Northwest Publishing Agency
1105-D 15th Avenue PMB #428
Longview, WA 98632
I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF WHAT AIN’T RIGHT!;
WE WON!
It is a very rare thing for a novel to be written by a committee, but to a certain extent, that’s what happened with The Brigade. There are a lot of people, too many to name, who read the sample chapters over a period of eighteen months, and who deserve an expression of gratitude for their time, effort, constructive criticism, and input. Besides the multitude of readers involved, it is an unfortunate fact that in the present paranoid political climate in America, it may well be dangerous for me publicly to acknowledge their contributions.
However, I simply can’t resist giving kudos to a few people without whom this book would not have been written. We’re not in a position to give medals yet, so this will have to do. The first comrades who require homage are the Secret Six who kept a roof over my head while I was writing the book. You know who you are. Marcus the Computermeister kept my ancient machine functioning and sprang for updated software that has proven invaluable. Finally, I want to thank my three proofreaders Cinda Haupt, Matt Krause, and Joe Ryncarz, who took a first draft that was little short of gibberish and made it readable.
Whatever effect this book may have on future events, and on the hearts and minds of our people, the credit is by no means mine alone. I don’t know what to say, except thank you all.
— H. A. Covington
This book is dedicated to the memory of David Lane, a true hero now ascended into Valhalla, and to all his comrades, living and dead.
N. B. This glossary also applies to the previous three Northwest novels: A Distant Thunder, A Mighty Fortress, and The Hill of the Ravens. Certain terms may not appear in all of the books.
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God — Christian hymn written by Martin Luther. The national anthem of the Northwest American Republic.
Active Service Unit — The basic building block of the NVA paramilitary structure. Generally speaking, an active service unit was any team or affinity group of Northwest Volunteers engaged in armed struggle against the United States government. The largest active service units during the War of Independence were the flying columns (q.v.) that moved across the countryside in open insurrection. These could sometimes number as many as 75 or even 100 men. More usual was the urban team or crew ranging from four or five to no more than a dozen Volunteers. After a unit grew larger than seven or eight people, the logistics of movement and supply and also the risk of betrayal reached unacceptably high levels, and the cell would divide in two with each half going its separate way. Command and coordination between the units was often tenuous at best. The success and survival of an active service unit was often a matter of the old Viking adage: "Luck often enough will save a man, if his courage hold."
Aztlan — A semi-autonomous province of Mexico consisting of the old American states of southern and western Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, parts of Colorado, and southern California, below a line roughly parallel with the Mountain Gate border post.
BATFE — Alcohol,Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives division of the United States Treasury Department. Used by the government in Washington D.C. to suppress many early right wing and racial nationalist groups and individuals. Unlike its more sophisticated counterpart the FBI, BATFE seldom resorted to such things as bribery, fabrication, or forgery to get convictions. All brawn and no brain, BATFE simply smashed their way into the homes of dissidents such as Kenyon Bellew and David Koresh and started shooting. Many of their agents later became Fatties when the FATPO (q.v.) superceded the old ATF organization at the beginning of the War of Independence. BATFE was declared a criminal organization by Parliament and any surviving members are subject to arrest, trial, and punishment if apprehended.
The Beast — Term similar in meaning to ZOG (q.v.) used initially by Christian Identity people to describe the federal government of the United States and the Zionist, liberal power structure in general. The expression later came into more widespread use among the Northwest American Republic's non-CI population.
Break Bad — An incident or encounter between the NVA and federal forces or other enemy agencies that turned violent.
Bremer Wall — Heavy concrete berm, portable and lowered into place by a crane, used by the Americans to fortify police stations, federal buildings, FATPO barracks, Green Zones, etc. Also used extensively by American occupation forces in conquered Middle Eastern countries.
Brigade — In the paramilitary organization of the Northwest Volunteer Army, a loose combination of all of the partisan units assigned to a specific geographic area. In the larger cities of the Homeland such as Seattle, Portland or Spokane there might be as many as two or three brigades, each operating independently of the others, so that a single catastrophic betrayal or federal assault could not wipe out the NVA in that metropolitan area. A brigade could comprise as many as two or three dozen active service units of various kinds and strengths, including technical, supply, and support teams. Some of the smaller brigades covering larger and more rural areas only had a few units. In actual practice there was always an immense amount of confusion and overlap in membership and function between units. As is the case with any conflict, nothing about the War of Independence was ever as neatly cut and dried as the Republic's history books have portrayed.
BOSS — Bureau of State Security. The Northwest American Republic's political police. The mission of BOSS may be summed up simply in the five words of its motto: “We will never go back.” In The Hill of the Ravens Don Redmond summarizes that mission when he says, “The revolution is forever. Our job is to make sure of that.”
CI — Christian Identity. By the time of the writing of The Hill of the Ravens, the predominant Christian religious movement in the Republic. The faith of Pastor Richard Butler, Robert Miles, and many others among the founding fathers of the Northwest American Republic. The essence of Christian Identity is the transfer of God's Biblical covenant from the Jewish people to the Gentile or Aryan peoples through the medium of the Christ's Passion and the Crucifixion. In most Christian Identity sects this transfer is accompanied by a very complex (sometimes downright tortuous) theological construct whereby white people are alleged to be racial descendants of the Israelites of the Bible through the alleged wanderings of the Lost Tribes through Europe, Denmark being descended from the tribe of Dan, etc. However tenuous the historical and theological basis for Christian Identity, there can be no doubt of the spiritual strength and personal integrity that the CI faith imparts to its adherents. During the Time of Struggle and ever since, they have been the very backbone of the Northwest nation.
Centcom — During the War of Independence, Centcom was the central command authority of the American occupation forces, consisting of representatives from the executive and judicial branches of government, the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, etc.
Chug-Chug — Home-made mortar, often of unusual caliber, used by the NVA to attack fortified federal positions and Green Zones.
Code Duello — The official protocols and procedures governing dueling within the Republic, administered by the National Honor Court. The purpose of the Code Duello is to make sure that the ultimate sanction for personal misbehavior remains available to all the Republic's citizens, but only under very clear and formally recognized conditions. Ref. the Old Man: “One of the problems under ZOG was that there was no longer any penalty attached to being an asshole. There needs to be.”
Come Home — To immigrate to the Northwest American Republic. Since the NAR is the Homeland of all Indo-European peoples, a white immigrant is considered to have Come Home.
Daryl and His Other Brother Daryl — Defamatory term used by certain white migrants to the Homeland during pre-revolutionary times to denote white people born in rural areas of the Northwest. Considered rude, boorish, and highly discouraged by the Party both before and since the revolution.
DHS — Department of Homeland Security. One of the many overlapping federal political police agencies created under Bush II as part of the suspension of the United States Constitution and the abrogation of American civil liberties that took place following the events of September 11, 2001. The Department of Homeland Security seems to have done little during the time of the revolution beyond adding to the confusion.
DM —Drooling moron. Defamatory term used by certain white migrants during the pre-revolutionary times to denote white people born in rural areas of the Northwest Homeland. Always frowned upon and discouraged by the Party. Several legal cases are now before the National Honor Court to decide whether “DM” is to be considered a killing word or not.
E & E — Escape and evasion. Associated with General Order Number Eight, a.k.a. the “Feets Don't Fail Me Now” order. When an operation went bad, or when confronted with a federal ambush, extreme danger, or overwhelming enemy numbers, every NVA Volunteer had a personal escape and evasion plan, a series of refuges and safe houses to which they would flee and from which they would subsequently regroup. The underlying rationale of General Order Number Eight was the ancient one of all guerrilla forces: He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.
E-Piece — Throw away handgun used for close-in assassination work, usually of small caliber and cheap manufacture, which could be discarded afterwards without the loss of an expensive heavy-caliber weapon such as a Glock or a Colt .44.
Ex Gladio Libertas — The motto of the Northwest Volunteer Army, and later of the Northwest American Republic itself as an acknowledgement of the origin of the state. Literally translated: Freedom comes from the sword.
FATPO — Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization. A body of special auxiliary police officers recruited by the United States government to suppress the revolution in the Pacific Northwest, after the FBI and local authorities had clearly lost control and it was not deemed politically expedient to use the regular military in a significant role. FATPOs were mostly recruited from discharged members of the United States military, local police departments, and from both sides of the bars within the American empire's immense prison system. FATPOs were given a short but intensive training campaign at Fort Bragg combining counterinsurgency, commando and SWAT-team style tactics, along with heavy political indoctrination in diversity, multiculturalism, etc. Nominally subject to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, but in reality the government in D.C. was far away, and a blind eye was turned. Local FATPO commanders had a blank check and more or less operated as independent warlords in their districts, above the law so long as they produced a plentiful white body count. Discipline and control from Centcom was patchy at best, accountability was nil, atrocities frequent, media reporting of those atrocities almost non-existent, and any serious military purpose or strategy quickly disappeared. The FATPOs in short order became nothing more than gangs of brutal gunthugs devoted to the bloody suppression of the NVA and any white citizen of the Northwest whom they so much as suspected might be sympathetic to the NVA. Strict policies of affirmative action and mandatory diversity were applied, and at any given time the force was only about 35 percent white and perhaps 25 percent white male. There were an unknown but significant percentage of lesbian and homosexual sadists who mainly operated in the intelligence units of FATPO as interrogators, and who earned themselves a reputation as some of the most cruel and vicious torturers in the history of human tyranny.
FBI — Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American secret police. Still extant, although now less involved in Northwest affairs than their rivals of the Office of Northwest Recovery (q.v.) Declared a criminal organization by Parliament after independence. Any member of the FBI or anyone assisting the FBI is liable to arrest, trial, and punishment under the laws of the Republic.
Flying Column — During the War of Independence, an independent unit of partisans numbering from 30 to 100 Volunteers. These guerrilla units were usually based in rural areas throughout the Pacific Northwest, and operated in the countryside and small towns. They were highly mobile and conducted operations against the American forces, against the means of production, and cleared their operational areas of American law enforcement, judicial, and governmental institutions to make way for the Republic's courts, police, and government. Because of the activities of the flying columns, the United States eventually lost control of the countryside almost completely and could maintain its authority only in the cities, and there only through repressive force. There were over thirty flying columns during the course of the War of Independence. The most famous among them were the Olympic Flying Column (Cmdt. Thomas J. Murdock); the Port Townsend Flying Column (Cmdt. John C. Morgan); the Hayden Lake Flying Column (Cmdt. O.C. Oglevy); The Barbary Pirates (Arcata and Eureka, California district, Cmdt. Phil McDevitt); the Sawtooth Flying Column (Cmdt. Winston Wayne); the Corvallis Flying Column (Cmdt. Billy Basquine); the Montana Regulators (Cmdt. Jack Smith); and the Ellensburg Flying Column (Cmdt. David “Bloody Dave” Leach).
Goots — Derogatory and defamatory term used by native-born white people in the Northwest for racially conscious Aryan settlers who came into the Homeland during pre-revolutionary times. Origin unknown but possibly originated with Seattle disc jockey Ray Sheckstein.
Green Zone — Heavily fortified and secured federal or military headquarters area, sometimes encompassing several square miles. Green Zones were used as bases of operations and administration for American occupation forces in the Middle East and in the Pacific Northwest.
GUBU — Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented. Slang term used to describe most activities of the Aryan resistance movement prior to the advent of the Northwest Migration concept, and regrettably for some time after that as well.
Gun Bunny — Adolescent female Northwest Volunteer or associate of the NVA. A number of these young women distinguished themselves in combat, intelligence, and support roles during the War of Independence.
GW — Kinetic energy firearms named after the renowned Texas gunsmith and engineer Gary Wilkerson, who invented a kinetic energy plate whereby the bullet is not propelled by a gunpowder-charged cartridge, but by a small kinetic energy charge from a metal power grid in the receiving group or bolt assembly of the weapon. Wilkerson KE technology is the basis for most NDF (q.v.) small arms.
Hats or Hat Squad — Semi-derogatory, pre-revolutionary term used by native-born white Northwesterners for Aryan settlers who answered the Old Man's call for migration. Refers to the eventual adoption of the fedora hat as the badge or insignia for Northwest settlers, at first of the Christian Identity faith, then later on the practice spread to migrants of all faiths.
It Takes A Village — Slang term for the Federal Child Protection and Welfare Act, passed during the first term of President Hillary Clinton. Basically, a form of legalized kidnapping of white children for purposes of social engineering and federal revenue enhancement. The name comes from a book written in the 1990s by Ms. Clinton when she was co-president. Based on the precedent of the Elian Gonzales case of 2000, the act gave the federal government the power to obtain legal custody over any child deemed to be “at risk” from any “undesirable or inappropriate home environment,” terms which could, of course, mean whatever the local U.S. Attorney said they meant, and then place such children elsewhere. In actual practice the act was used to take advantage of the scarcity of healthy white infants and young children available for adoption by the wealthy, due to the declining white birth rate in the early 21st century. The only children deemed to be at risk under the act were white, from poor or politically incorrect families. Placement involved an adoption bond from the adopting parents, which could range from $100,000 for older children to as high as a million dollars for a healthy, blond-haired and blue or green-eyed female infant.
Longview Conference — The conference wherein the United States agreed to withdraw from the areas of the Northwest Homeland deemed to be “administratively untenable,” i.e. effectively under NVA control. At that point in time this consisted of the states of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, parts of western Montana, and most of Wyoming.
NAR — Northwest American Republic. Nation established as a worldwide home for all persons of unmixed Aryan, that is to say white, non-Semitic, European descent. The Northwest American Republic presently consists of the entire states of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming as well as hefty chunks of northern California, western Montana, Alberta, and British Columbia.
National Socialism — The racial and political world view (Weltanschaung in German) of the philosopher, soldier, and statesman Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
NBA — Northwest Broadcasting Authority. State body in charge of all broadcast communications and entertainment in the Northwest American Republic.
NDF — Northwest Defense Force. The combined land, sea, air and space commands of the NAR military. All male citizens of the Republic are required to serve in the NDF for a minimum of two years of active duty plus reserve requirements up until age 50.
NLS — National Labor Service. There is no welfare as such in the Northwest American Republic. Neither is there any unemployment. If no private sector jobs are available in a particular field or locality, the Labor Service steps in to provide employment, usually on public works of various kinds. Many Northwest workers choose to work for the NLS voluntarily.
NVA — Northwest Volunteer Army. Formed on October 22nd in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in response to the murder of the Singer family. Predecessor to the NDF.
OBA — Old Believers Association. The official NAR organization of non-Christian religious groups including Asatru, the proto-NS Nordic Faith Movement, and some elements of Wicca and Druidic cultism.
Old Man — Early advocate of Northwest Migration and independence. Helped found the Party (q.v.) and served as a convenient figurehead for the independence movement during the War of Independence, although he always considered his role in the revolution to be very much exaggerated. Served two terms as State President and was able to stabilize and consolidate the gains of the revolution, but was effectively removed from power by President Patrick Brennan and the Pragmatic Tendency in Parliament because he was thought to be a dangerously radical relic of the past. Presently President Emeritus of the Republic and living in seclusion. Suffers from dementia praecox due to his advanced age and is generally confused and incoherent. Has issues with ducks. [See The Hill of the Ravens.]
ONR — The United States Office of Northwest Recovery. Covert agency of the United States government devoted to the long term goal of returning the Northwest Republic to the United States and Canada respectively. Regularly conducts assassinations, sabotage, and other subversive activities within the Northwest American Republic.
On the Bounce — NVA slang term for being on the run from the American police and military.
Operation Strikeout — Twelve years after the Longview Conference the United States and Canada, in conjunction with the United Nations, launched what they believed to be a surprise attack against the Northwest Republic, intending to re-conquer the Pacific Northwest and return the Homeland to American imperial rule. Due to superior intelligence on the part of BOSS (q.v.) and the War Prevention Bureau (q.v.) the attack was not the surprise that the Pentagon thought it would be. The Americans and Canadians were decisively defeated in a campaign lasting 46 days and large sections of northern California, Alberta, British Columbia and Alaska were added to the Republic's territory.
The Party — The fighting revolutionary Party of Northwest independence founded by the Old Man, once a sufficient number of racially aware migrants had arrived in the Homeland to effect the socio-political demographic change necessary to make such a Party feasible. Although the Party was comprised mostly of people who were native-born in the Northwest, it was made possible by the influx of racially aware migrants who listened to the Old Man's call and heeded it. Based upon the principles of National Socialism as expressed in the Cotswolds Declaration of 1962 and the Ten Principles of National Socialist Thought, yet offering a broad program of tolerance and participation for all Aryan religious and political tendencies, the Party provided the political leadership for the revolution, while the NVA provided the military capability.
Resurrection Shuffle — NVA term for going on the run, evading the Federal forces.
Rockwell, Commander George Lincoln (1918-1967) — American National Socialist leader. Founder of the American Nazi Party and the World Union of National Socialists.
Senior Citizens’ Quality of Life Act — Passed during Hillary Clinton’s second term as president. Allowed the euthanasia of elderly people in hospitals and nursing homes who, in the opinion of their physician, were “unlikely ever to achieve any quality of life or ability to live unassisted.” The physician was required to consult with the senior’s family before administering the fatal injection of sodium pentothal, or “hot shot,” but these very broad parameters led to widespread abuse by physicians who wanted to lighten their workloads or who were susceptible to bribes from family members, and by families anxious to gain inheritance and insurance benefits. The vast majority of elderly people thus legally euthanized were white.
Shock and Awe — A customary tactic for NVA partisans lying in wait to ambush federal troops, police, news media, or other enemy personnel. The concealed Volunteers would suddenly explode in a precisely aimed, concentrated hail of gunfire on full automatic or other rapid fire technique, using armor piercing bullets, rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) etc. The object was to inflict as much damage as possible in the opening seconds of an encounter, disorienting and disabling enemy reaction, before a rapid withdrawal under cover of smoke grenades or other stratagems. Also known as the Mad Minute.
Spuckies — Derogatory and defamatory term used by local white people in the Northwest to denote racially conscious white settlers who came into the Homeland during pre-revolutionary times. Origin of this term unknown.
SS — Special Service. The NAR and the Party’s élite military formation. Drawn from the top achievers of all the NDF branches, with naval, air, and space mobile wings. Highly trained and equipped with the most advanced equipment, the SS deliberately follows the traditions of its historic namesake of the Third Reich. The corps seeks to erase all differences and divisions of class, religion, and nationality, creating a true Aryan band of brothers. For this purpose, extensive political and racial education based on the principles of National Socialism is part and parcel of SS training and qualification.
Stukach — A Russian term meaning informer, dating from the time of Stalin and the hideous purges of the 1930s. How exactly this term entered the lexicon of the Northwest American Republic is not certain. When applied to the family or person of a citizen, it is considered the ultimate insult, along with the words whigger and attorney. All three are considered to be killing words, i.e. prima facie casus belli under the law of the Republic for a duel to the death if the parties involved cannot be reconciled by formal procedures under the Code Duello.
Take The Gap — Broadly speaking, to Come Home. To immigrate to the Northwest American Republic. In practice, to “take the gap” generally connotes an illegal entry into the Homeland from the United States, Aztlan, Canada, or sometimes by air. “Taking the gap” often involves physically running the border under gunfire and pursuit.
Tickle — An operation of the Northwest Volunteer Army against a federal or Zionist target.
Third Section (Threesec) — Intelligence, counterintelligence, security and special operations department of the Party prior to 10/22 and during the War of Independence. Created by Matt Redmond, who served as Threesec's first director until his death. Organizational ancestor of both BOSS (q.v.) and War Prevention Bureau (q.v.).
Volunteer — A male or female soldier of the Northwest Volunteer Army.
Whigger — “White nigger.” A defamatory term for whites during the pre-revolutionary time who aped the mannerisms, behavior, and subculture of blacks. Considered to be a killing word in the NAR, i.e. sufficient casus belli for a duel to the death if no compromise can be reached between the parties involved.
Whizz-Bang — Home-made rocket used by the NVA to attack fortified positions.
Woodchuck — Originallya term with defamatory and derogatory connotations used by Aryan settlers in the Homeland to denote those born in the Northwest, especially in rural areas. Now transmuted and claimed as a proud and honorable designation by those born in the Homeland.
WPB — The NAR’s War Prevention Bureau. A covert agency designed to prevent the necessary military, political, and psychological conditions from developing within the United States, Aztlan, or anywhere else that might lead to an existential military threat to the existence of the Northwest Republic, through the use of targeted assassination and other black ops. The WPB is also responsible for tracking down and liquidating spies and traitors to the Northwest Republic, including informers and traitors from the time of the War of Independence. Their motto in German is “Alles bekennings wird abgerechnet.” (Translation: “All accounts will be settled.")
ZOG — Zionist Occupation Government. Term originally created by the obscure National Socialist writer Eric Thomson in the 1970s. Strictly construed, ZOG means the federal government of the United States. In actual usage it is a much more all-embracing term meaning the System, the Establishment, the generic "them" used by oppressed peoples to denote the federal tyrant.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall n’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
King Henry V — Act IV, Scene 3
I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF WHAT AIN’T RIGHT!;
Bleed, bleed, poor country!
Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,
For goodness dare not check thee.
Wear thou thy wrongs, thy title is affear’d …
Macbeth — Act IV, Scene 3
“I’ll do it,” said Zack Hatfield.
“Do what?” asked his friend Charlie Washburn.
“Kill them,” said Hatfield. “I’m going to kill both of those bitches.”
The two of them were sitting on plastic-upholstered armchairs in the musty living room of Zack’s cheap furnished apartment in Astoria, Oregon. Hatfield was a tall and rangy blond man in his late 20s. His muscles were lean and ropy, and his often scowling face was prematurely seamed from working outside in the cold and the wind, at whatever temporary labor jobs he could find in his home town that hadn’t been snapped up by Mexicans. Washburn was a heavy-set, blue-chinned man, a few years older, who had lost the battle of the bulge and who was beginning to lose the battle of the receding hairline. A third man sat on an old sofa with broken springs. He was a local hardware store owner in his late 50s named Lennart Ekstrom. His face was lean and chiseled, his moustache and mane of hair speckled with white, but thick. Washburn and Ekstrom looked at Hatfield in silence for a long moment. It did not occur to them to doubt that he meant what he said. They had known him all their lives, and they were familiar with his military record in Iraq. There was no sound except for the patter of an early winter rain on the windows in the black darkness outside. “Jesus,” said Charlie softly.
“I’ll do it on my own if need be, although I could use some help,” Hatfield told them. “If you’re in, we’ll talk about it. If not, I think it’s best that you both clear out right now, and then we shouldn’t see each other for a while. When we do, afterwards, nobody ever says anything about it. Not a word. Zip.”
“Is there really no other way, Zack?” asked Ekstrom in a leaden voice.
It was a rhetorical question. All three of them knew there wasn’t any other way.
Earlier that day, Zack Hatfield had been sitting in the visiting room of the Clatsop County jail. Not the open room with the tables and chairs for family visits, but the walled-in security chamber with a Plexiglass-separated cubicle equipped with telephones for communication, while a corrections officer loomed watchfully behind the prisoner he was there to see. Steven King’s crime was one of the most serious on both the Oregon and the federal statute books, and under state regulations he had to be kept under the strict restraint and supervision.
Facing Hatfield behind the Plexiglass, King looked ghastly. The former manager of the Seaside store of a major grocery chain was not wearing the orange jumpsuit of American shame, but ragged garments with old-fashioned black and white stripes which for some reason had never fallen out of use in Clatsop. The communications phone he held limply in one quivering hand. His once cherubically handsome face was now fishbelly white and gaunt, with the remnants of a double chin and once chubby cheeks drooping loosely from his skull in wattled folds of skin. His brown hair hung in lank rat-tails from his head, and showed new streaks of white that hadn’t been there a few weeks before. His horn-rimmed eyeglasses were taped together with a huge lump of Scotch tape at the hinge on the right side of his face. Hatfield decided against asking King how the breakage had come about, nor did his friend volunteer the information. Hatfield could guess in a general way what had happened, but he saw no need to hear this particular variation on the hideous American theme of a middle class white man suddenly hurled into the nightmare world of prison. Besides, King was so wrapped up in his own personal misery that beatings by whatever Mexican or meth-head had hurt him didn’t even seem to figure in his mind. He appeared disconnected with his body, feeling only the endless suffering in his heart and in his soul. All he could do was to keep coming back to the same refrain, over and over again, like an animal in a trap desperately trying to chew off its own leg in order to escape.
“How could she do this to me?” he moaned. “I loved her! I love her still, in spite of it all! I gave her everything I could, everything I had. Liddy and the girls were my whole world! I would have moved heaven and earth to make her happy. I don’t understand. What did I do wrong?”
“You aren’t the one who has done wrong, Steve,” Zack told him. “But do you mean to tell me, honestly, that you never saw any of this coming? I did, and so did Charlie and Len and just about everybody else. Okay, maybe nothing this foul, but we all knew Liddy was going to break bad on you at some point in time. The storm warnings were all there. She was always so brittle, always the chip on her shoulder, always that odd little look in her eyes, creeping people out. Every time I was over at your house or we ever met anywhere, Liddy managed to find some way to twist the conversation around and force some kind of politically correct feminist or pro-fag crap in there like she was some kind of suburban Jane Fonda. The constant little needling remarks, always trying to get in people’s faces, always trying to pick a fight with you even when there were other people present. The pseudo-intellectual airs, quoting from Sartre and Sylvia Plath and ancient Greeks as if she knew what the hell she was talking about, which I happen to be well-read enough on my own to know she didn’t. Her inability to be happy. The so-called community activism that always seemed to involve helping somebody other than this community. You’re telling me you never recognized the signs?”
“Oh, she was always like that, ever since she came back from the university,” said King with a shrug. “I mean, what else do you expect from U of O? I just figured she rebelled against her religious upbringing when she went to college, trying to be chic and fit in, and then she just sort of never grew out of it. I actually used to think it was kind of cute, kind of her way of retaining her youth.”
“Yeah, well, baby tarantulas grow up into big fucking poisonous spiders,” Hatfield reminded him.
But King was back onto his old refrain. “Why, Zack? I just don’t understand it. Why?” he went on in a monotone.
“Because it’s expected of her,” said Hatfield.
“What?”
“Tony tells me that Marie Campisi asked Liddy that very same question, why?” Hatfield went on. “She said because she was past 30 years old and it was time for her first divorce.”
“She’s planning on more?” asked King in a disconnected daze.
“Yah, apparently that’s the big thing in all the feminist self-help and psychobabble books now. They call it life scheduling or some such shit,” explained Hatfield. “The first marriage is for kids, which of course she always takes with her in the divorce settlement after soaking hubby number one for every penny she can. Apparently the lesbian thing is also something every truly liberated woman is supposed to schedule now. At least one major lesbo relationship in your life or else you’re not a true Womyn. I think Pocahontas may be in for a shock, though. I actually looked that crap up on the internet, and after her lesbo fling, if she decides she prefers guys, Liddy is supposed to try to bag an older man who is very wealthy and who will most likely kick off by the time she’s 45 and leave her set for life. Or a wealthy older dyke if she decides she wants to keep on munching carpet. I think all Ms. Proudfoot has to her name is a welfare check and a line of noble Native American Womyn crap.”
“Woe-men?” repeated King.
Hatfield nodded. “That’s the way fems write it. I think that’s how it’s pronounced. It’s one of those PC shibboleths the media and the intelligentsia are trying to introduce into the language and make into an accepted and then mandatory term, like the word Ms. George Orwell wrote about it in 1984. Newspeak. Mind control. Just like we have to say African-American instead of nigger. When a totalitarian society controls the language, controls the words that people use in speech, and punishes them for using any word or terminology other than the prescribed ones, eventually the whole population will be so afraid they’ll start using the politically correct terms in their very thoughts, to make sure they don’t blurt out some word that will make them lose their jobs or get them arrested for hatespeech. The state ends up controlling not just their behavior and their speech, but shaping and controlling their very thoughts. Any questioning of the politically correct orthodoxy becomes literally unthinkable, because we don’t know how. We don’t have the words for it. The United States has been aiming for that for years. Anyway, your life has to be destroyed because it fits into Liddy’s life schedule, apparently. It’s all about her, of course. You’re a used component and now she’s throwing you away.”
“But if she wanted a divorce she didn’t have to do—this!” King waved his hand around at the surrounding walls and Plexiglass. “Why this?”
“To make absolutely sure that she gets Caitlin and Judy,” Hatfield replied patiently. He had explained the situation to King several times before, and so had his court-appointed attorney, but it was obvious that King simply could not yet wrap his mind around what was being done to him. “Under both the federal hatecrime laws and the Oregon Diversity and Tolerance Act, any conviction for hatecrime or hatespeech automatically terminates a convicted offender’s parental rights. If both parents are convicted, then It Takes A Village moves in and grabs the kids and sells them, but in this case, since Liddy can show that she is in what she will claim to be a stable lesbian relationship, once you’re convicted she’ll walk into family court and walk out 10 minutes later with Caitlin and Judy wrapped up in a bow, a present from the judge.”
“All for one single word?” screamed King in horror. The walls were closing in on him and he was clearly beginning to go insane. “Just because I said dyke?”
“Hey, buddy, settle down!” snapped the guard behind him. “You’re in enough trouble already! I’m a pretty laid back kind of guy, but it’s my job to make sure you don’t talk any more hateful stuff, and if someone hears you it will be my ass in the wringer and they’ll slap another count on you!” He took the phone briefly from King’s hand and said to Hatfield, “Sir, you’ve got five minutes left.”
Hatfield ignored him, and when King got the phone back to his ear he went on. “Martha Proudfoot claims that you made her feel threatened because of her gender, her sexual orientation, and her race. I think she claims you said dyke squaw, actually. You’re lucky the D.A. kept it in state court and so you’re only looking at five years for the speech. If they’d gone federal with it they might claim that making the Proudfoot woman feel apprehensive was an act of hatefully-motivated assault, which they can do under the statute, and then they could hit you with actual hate crime, which is mandatory life, maybe without parole if the judge thinks you actually intended to strike her.”
“Strike her?” laughed King bitterly. “My God, have you seen that creature? She’s built like a bulldozer! I just lost my temper is all, when I walked into my living room and found them doing—dear Christ, what they were doing—I can’t even talk about it!”
“The Chocolate Ritual,” said Hatfield. “I know. It is supposed to be for bonding between female lovers. Most people have no idea of what homosexuals actually do. You were unlucky enough to get a crash course.”
“The girls were upstairs!” whispered King in horror. “They were upstairs, Zack! How could Liddy do that with Caity and Judy upstairs? Not to mention the fact that they must have known I would be home any minute?”
“Oh, they knew,” said Zack with an assured nod. “My guess is that they wanted to provoke exactly the kind of incident that occurred, so they could hang this hatespeech rap on you, and thereby Liddy gloms onto your daughters and the house and all your property. No messing around with alimony or child support payments or constant trips back and forth to court. You’ll be a certified hater. One bang of a judge’s gavel and she gets the whole kit and kaboodle. I wonder what the Proudfoot woman’s cut will be from that night’s work? Steve, you know that the FBI had some child psychologist and a couple of agents in the other day and they grilled the girls for four or five hours?”
“Yeah, Pritkin, my lawyer, told me about that. Caitlin is six years old! Judy is four! What in God’s name could they expect to get from children?” demanded King incredulously.
“Whatever Liddy coached them to say. But I did hear something interesting. I name no names, of course.” He figured King could guess that he was referring to Len Ekstrom’s daughter Christina, who was a police dispatcher in the Justice Center, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to mention her anywhere her co-workers might hear her name in connection with a hatespeech case. “They asked the girls if you’d ever said any bad things about black people or Hispanic people as well as gay people, that kind of crap. This thing up in Idaho last month has them really freaked out and maximum paranoid. The Marines just recaptured Coeur d’Alene a few days ago, and the feds are seeing white supremacist rebels under every bed now. They asked your girls if they’d ever seen any flags in your house. Green, white, and blue ones.”
“That’s lunacy!” gasped King in shock.
“In case you hadn’t noticed it, the people who rule us are lunatics. Among other things.” Behind King the guard was holding up two fingers. “That’s the two-minute warning.”
“My life is over now, because I uttered a single word in anger,” muttered King, still unable to comprehend the magnitude of his fall.
“Your life is over now, because you uttered a single word in anger,” confirmed Hatfield.
“No one on earth will help me,” King moaned.
Hatfield glanced up at the guard behind the broken man in the orange jumpsuit, uncertain as to how much the guard could hear of his end of the conversation. “No one on earth will help you,” Hatfield repeated aloud. But before the guard led Steven King away, Zack caught his friend’s eyes, and he winked.
Outside the jail, the rain was falling softly, steadily, and the light was already fading. Zack pulled out a wireless phone, punched in a number, and quickly texted a message, ARE YOU ALIVE? Before he hit send, he thought rapidly and decided that the question might get picked up and noticed by some kind of government monitoring, and so he changed the message simply to ????? Then he hit send, and waited in the rain under a streetlight for several long minutes. Finally the little window on the phone lit up and he saw a reply.
I AM THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST.
Zack Hatfield took a deep breath and after a brief moment of indecision, the last he would ever experience in his life, he texted back: I WANT IN. CALL ME. Then he closed his cell phone and walked off in the rain toward his battered, ten-year-old Toyota.
“Sure, there’s another way,” agreed Zack in a conversational tone, in answer to Ekstrom’s question. He took a sip from his can of generic supermarket diet cola; he couldn’t even afford a name brand of bellywash. “We can just stand by and wring our hands while Steve King’s life is destroyed, and the lives of two little girls are poisoned and twisted by perversion and politically correct horse shit, until they grow up into beastly toadstools like their mother. Oh, we can maybe squeak a bit in protest, but not too loud. We can do the things that powerless white men do these days to let off steam. We can write a letter to the editor, or maybe get drunk and call up a right-wing talk show, although we’d damned well better not say what we really think, or we’ll be up on hatespeech charges too. Then when we sober up we can sweat for days, hoping we didn’t open our mouths too much and hoping the FBI or the local PC snoops didn’t hear us, or that they’re too busy this week to put us in the crosshairs and come and tear apart our lives because we dared to annoy our lords and masters by making even that one little squeak. We can do that, Len. I think Steve might even be grateful for that much. Of course, that won’t keep him from being sent into living hell because he dared to say the word dyke out loud. And it won’t stop Liddy King and that goddamned Indian or whatever the fuck she is taking everything Steve has managed to accumulate in life, and living high off the hog on it while he suffers the tortures of the damned. And it won’t save Caitlin and Judy King from being raised to hate all men of their own race, and being taught that it’s right and natural for them to do disgusting things with candy bars when they grow up. Or maybe before they grow up.”
“Suppose we all club together whatever money we’ve got and try to hire a decent lawyer for Steve?” suggested Ekstrom.
“There’s no such thing as a decent lawyer, and even if there were, they wouldn’t stand a chance in these courts on a hatespeech case,” Zack told them. “No lawyer with enough clout to beat a hatespeech case will touch one, because of the repercussions to his own career if he does win. It’s like an accusation of witchcraft or heresy in the Middle Ages. There simply isn’t any defense. None is permitted, and you have to remember that under the law, an attorney never really represents his client. He’s an officer of the court, first and foremost, and he is not going to buck the system that makes the payments on his Porsche every month. Any shyster we hire would simply take our money and plead Steve out, just like that court-appointed Jew he’s got now is going to do. We’d be throwing our money away and letting these filthy courts keep up the pretense that there is some kind of fairness or justice left in them, which hasn’t been the case since long before any of us were born. Steve King is white, male, and he likes women, even though he picked the wrong one to like. He hasn’t got a chance, and we all know it. We either help him, or we cut him loose because we’re too chickenshit scared to do what has to be done, and we let him fall all the way into hell. Even if he survives prison, what kind of life do you think he’ll ever have again? He’ll have to register as a hate offender, and that means he’ll be lucky to find a job flipping burgers or changing rich people’s oil in one of those quick-lube places, if he can find one that isn’t taken by a Mexican. If we’re going to help him, it has to be now, and we have to actually help him. There is only one way. Those two bitches can’t be around to get up on a witness stand and swear his life away.”
“It’s not just about Steve,” said Washburn heavily. “It’s about Caitlin and Judy as well.”
“It’s not even about them, Charlie, not in the final analysis,” said Hatfield, shaking his head. “It’s about us. About whether we’re men or dogs, groveling and whimpering in front of this evil tyranny, thumping our tails between our legs and pissing on the floor in terror of their muscle-bound steroid thug cops and their FBI torturers in silk suits and their reptiles in black robes. Steve King is a friend of twenty years’ standing to all of us. What is being done to him ain’t right, and I’ve had enough of what ain’t right! No more!” Zack suddenly clenched his fist and roared aloud, a lifetime of rage and humiliation and contempt for the world around him welling up from his heart and his belly and his brain and bursting out of his body in an explosion.
Washburn looked at the other two men. “Me, too. I’m in. Len, I think Zack’s right. You’d best take a powder. Zack’s single and I’m divorced, and we both have crappy jobs and nothing to lose. You have a family and a business and you’ve got everything to lose. I wasn’t a Ranger like Zack, I was just a truck driver, but I remember enough of my military stint to fire a weapon. I’m sure two of us can do this. There’s no need for you to be involved.”
“Steve used to come by the store starting when he was about 10, buying little bits and pieces and tools and screws for his go-kart,” said Ekstrom, his face distorted now as he almost wept in rage. “He was a fine, bright boy, friendly, not a malicious or selfish bone in his body, and he never changed. His father was a good man and a good friend. Those two girls of his are so beautiful, so sweet and wonderful. I see them when he brings them by the store. I must stand by while this terrible thing is done to them, simply because I am afraid? I can’t do that. God would punish me if I did that. I’m with you guys. I’ve just plain had enough. This time they’re not going to get away with it. They can’t. There has got to be some justice left somewhere, or all the world becomes hell. I am tired of living in hell. I never thought that I would be ready in my own mind to kill someone. But I’m ready. At some point in time, this madness and this cruelty has to stop. For me, it stops with Steve King. They’re not going to get him. No.”
“That’s the real thing, all right,” said Zack with a sigh and a smile. “It’s taken how many years between us to reach this point? Sometimes I thought white men never would.”
“We have,” said Charlie. “Okay, Zack, you’re the ex-Ranger. You should know how to plan a double assassination. How do we go about this? What do you want Len and me to do?”
“I’ll do the planning and the actual killing. I need you two to provide an alibi, nothing more,” said Zack.
“I think I may start year-end inventory a bit early,” said Ekstrom. “You’re registered with the Helping Hand temp agency, right?”
“I’m registered with all the temp agencies,” said Hatfield. “For all the good it does me. I work about three days on a good week.”
“I know Brenda down there,” Ekstrom told them. “I use their people sometimes when I have a truck coming in with heavy stuff, and I have a nod-nod wink-wink arrangement with her not to send me any Mexicans, so at least my money goes to one of my neighbors who really needs it. She won’t think it’s so unusual when I call her up and ask her to send you to me, just doing a good turn for a friend kind of thing.”
“It needs to be at night, when no one is around in the store,” said Hatfield. “I show up around closing time and let your last customers see me moving some boxes around. Charlie comes in just before you close up, and he hangs out for the evening jaw-jacking with his good buddies Len and Zack and helping you count sheet metal screws. I wait until traffic dies down a bit. I slip out the back and head for Seaside. I do the job, get rid of the gun and any clothing or gear I need to lose, come back when it’s over, and slip back inside. You sign my ticket for eight hours, documentary evidence I was there all night. That piece of paper can get you the rest of your life in prison, of course. Len, are you really sure about this?”
“I’m sure,” said Ekstrom with a nod, and Hatfield could tell that he was. “I can also make you a key to Steve’s house in Seaside,” the older man continued. “Steve used to get all his keys made at the store, and he ordered some extra sets a while back. Not many people know that Homeland Security regs require anyone with a key cutter to keep the specs, names, and addresses for all keys made in case the FBI or DHS wants the information for some reason. I still have Steve’s house key pattern on my key machine’s computer.”
“We can hoist the bastards on the petard of their own snooping laws,” laughed Washburn.
“Will you need a piece?” asked Ekstrom. “I can let you have pretty much anything you want from my collection, and ammo as well.” Ekstrom was a licensed gunsmith, which was the only way he was able to make a serious living and keep his small hardware store competitive with Mighty Mart and House Depot and the other big chain stores. His was one of the last remaining actual merchant businesses on Commercial Street in Astoria; most of the other storefronts were now converted to yuppie fern bars, chintzy antique shops, “quaint” eateries of various kinds, and offices for left-leaning activist organizations.
“No, I have one of my own I can use,” said Hatfield. “I’m going to ditch it afterwards, of course, but I don’t want to take the risk of getting caught with anything that might be traced back to you. If this goes bad, you just tell the cops I went out for lunch and never came back, and you had no idea I intended to commit such a horrible hateful act. I don’t want to drag you guys down with me.”
“When do we do it?” asked Washburn.
“It needs to be fast,” said Hatfield. “I did get from Steve that the kids are with Liddy’s mother for a week or so, and the Proudfoot bull dyke has moved into Steve’s house so she and Liddy can have their orgies with no risk of the little girls walking in on them, which I find charmingly delicate of them, if a bit too late. They’re probably on their p’s and q’s so they’ll look good in court. That means they’ll be alone in the house. I’ve been in and out of Steve’s place for years, and so I already know the lay of the land, no need for any extensive preliminary scouting or observation. Liddy was also dumb enough to give Steve’s dog away to the SPCA as an act of spite, so I won’t have to worry about Spuds or maybe have to silence him, which is definitely a load off my mind. Spuds is a cool mutt, and it would really bother me to have to hurt him. I sneak in with the key, cack them both, and I’m outta there.”
“In and out,” said Washburn. “It’s a good simple plan.”
“Yeah, well, the first thing you learn in the military is that no plan ever survives the first day of combat,” said Hatfield wryly. “The simplest plans are the best, but even so, there are always a hundred things that can go wrong.”
“You do realize the shit is going to hit the fan big time when two lesbians with a hatespeech case pending against a white male are murdered?” asked Charlie. “You also realize that yours is the first door Sheriff Ted Lear is going to come knocking on? He knows you and Steve have been tight since high school, plus you visited him in jail.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why I need you two guys as my alibi,” said Hatfield with a grin. “But I’ve also got a little trick up my sleeve to muddy the waters like hell. I’m going to take a magic marker with me, and I’m going to write the letters NVA on the wall. Maybe in their blood.”
“Jesus, Zack, that will be sure to bring in the FBI!” exclaimed Washburn. “After what’s happened in Coeur d’Alene, they’re descending on the Northwest like a swarm of angry bees!”
“Are they? Or are they running around like chickens with their heads cut off?” queried Hatfield. “Charlie, remember, I saw the federal government of the United States in all its glory operating in Iraq. You have no idea how incompetent they are, what complete idiots they are. 20,000 or so ragged, barefoot little brown men with nothing but AK-47s and a few RPGs whipped the mighty United States Army and Marines down into jelly when I was there, and they’re still doing it all over the Middle East. Have been for almost a generation now, and these morons in Washington still haven’t got a clue! All they know how to do is jump however high and run however far Israel and the Jews tell them to. My guess is that by writing NVA on the wall I can ratchet this thing right out of Ted Lear’s hands and up onto the federal level where it’s simply lost in the shuffle. Ted Lear is smart. He can read this, although he may not be able to prove anything, and he may not want to. He’s a friend of Steve King too. But I’d rather have the dumb-ass FBI on my trail than any local cop who knows the ground and knows the people involved, and who has a couple of brain cells to rub together. We see all over CNN and Fox News that the uprising in Coeur d’Alene has been crushed and it’s all over. I don’t buy that. My guess is what’s left of the real NVA is going to keep on fighting and hitting these bastards, and very quickly the file on these homicides will end up gathering dust in some SAIC’s pending basket, with the files from a hundred other NVA hits piled on top of it.”
“So when do we do it?” repeated Charlie.
“Len, make your call to Helping Hand tomorrow morning,” said Hatfield decisively. “I’ll blow those dykes away tomorrow night.”
Steve King’s house was a large split-level ranch-style dwelling built on a wide landscaped lawn, constructed in redwood paneling and stucco on the outside with a brick planter and other tag ends of brick trim, house and lot, sitting on a beetling ridge in a subdivision just south of the coastal town of Seaside. Zack hadn’t been too happy about driving through the town itself on his way there, since the one major weakness in his plan was his vehicle. The only car he could come up with for this murder mission was his own, and that was a dangerous and foolhardy thing to do, but he could not in all good conscience ask either of the other men to loan him a car or truck, and risk linking them to the killings. Before starting out that night, Hatfield had cut several short strips of black masking tape, made sure his front and rear Oregon license plates were dry so the tape would stick, and carefully altered his license number by transforming the I into a T and the 5 into a passable 8. The resulting false license number would raise a red flag if it were run on the DMV computer by a police officer, but you had to get very close up to see the tape, and from a distance it worked.
After crossing the great bridge over Youngs Bay he took a carefully pre-planned route, turning left off Highway 101 as soon as he came into Gearhart and swinging wide along some back roads to bypass the glowing rainy streets of Gearhart and Seaside, so hopefully no one would recall seeing his car. It had taken him an extra half hour, and he would have to take the same route going back. It was a long time on the road, but there was no help for it. He made sure he had a full tank of gas before he left, cleaned his fuel injectors, checked his battery and replaced the starter just in case. He wanted to make damned sure that engine fired up when he needed it to start.
Now Hatfield stood outside the house preparing himself for his entry. It was about 10:30 at night, moonless and drizzly, perfect for Hatfield’s purpose. Clatsop County deputies left local law enforcement in the county’s many small towns to small municipal forces. Hatfield remembered that Ted Lear had once mentioned in some casual context or other that Seaside police shift change (all four cars of it) took place at 11 p.m., and so by now the single-cop squad cars and station staff should be easing on back to the barn, so the cops could turn in their gear and paperwork and go off duty as close to 11 as they could manage, before heading home or off to Ray’s Tavern, which had a special late-night liquor license to accommodate the gents in blue. There was a faint salty tang in the air from the nearby beach, just a couple of blocks away, and the sound of the Pacific breakers could be heard low and soft in the dark night air. The lots and lawns in the neighborhood were large, and there were almost 50 yards between King’s house and the neighboring homes on either side. Hatfield counted on the distance and hopefully some internal noise of televisions, home entertainment centers, and computers in the homes of King’s neighbors to make sure no shots were heard.
He parked his car on a narrow yet paved verge in front of the right-hand neighbor’s house, to prevent leaving any tire tracks, although there wasn’t much chance of that with the asphalt as wet as it was from the drizzle. This also meant that so long as he walked only on the concrete driveway and stayed off the grass and out of the muddy shrubbery, he didn’t have to worry about leaving any footprints. Even so, he was wearing hospital shoe covers tied on over his shoes, which he would get rid of afterwards. The car was almost centered between two streetlights. It meant a longer walk, but Zack had balanced that against the possibility of someone noticing his Toyota in front of the King home. Zack pulled on a pair of latex surgical gloves and pulled up the hood of the cheap parka sweatshirt he’d gotten from the Salvation Army store last year. It would go as well; few people had seen him in the garment and no one should remember it.
He walked calmly down the empty street and turned in at the Kings’ driveway. Inside the sweat shirt, stuck into his belt was a truncated double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun. Before he left the hardware store in Astoria, he had placed the old Remington, which had belonged to Zack’s father, into Len Ekstrom’s vice grip and carefully taken the double barrel down to 18 inches with a hacksaw and oil, and cut off the stock of the old weapon down to the grip. The amputated fragments were in a plastic bag in Zack’s trunk for disposal along with the gun itself, the parka, and other bits and pieces. The gun was loaded with two shells of .00 buckshot, and Zack had half a dozen more rounds in the sweatsuit parka’s pockets. He also had a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 in an interior clip holster stuck in his belt at the small of his back. The house was dark as he walked up the driveway except for a single light in the front living room downstairs. He glanced through the windows of the garage and saw Steve’s SUV and Liddy’s Lexus parked inside. There was a battered military-surplus Hummer in the driveway sporting a number of feminist and pro-abortion bumper stickers, which Zack had learned belonged to Martha Proudfoot. There were no other cars in the driveway, which was a good sign. Zack mounted the steps to the front door and took from his back pocket the key that Len had cut for him.
Hatfield stood at the front door, thinking of his text message to the Ghost of Christmas past. I may well be doing something like this again soon, he reflected. If so, I damned well better plan it a lot better. This job was too rushed. He was now at the point of no return; he could if he wished simply turn and walk away, and possibly he should. There were several things that could go wrong now if he proceeded to enter the house. First, the key might not work, and he might have to go around to the rear door, use his knife to cut through the screen and then either kick in or jimmy the door lock to force entry, thus alerting those inside. Secondly, he had no way of knowing if Liddy King or the Proudfoot woman had become sufficiently paranoid to install an alarm system. Steve King had never used one, since this part of the Northwest was still sufficiently crime-free so it had not seemed necessary, as long as the family had Spuds the terrier to sound the alarm in case of intrusion. But with the media full of hysterical raving about evil racist terrorist conspiracies in the wake of the October rebellion in Idaho, the two lesbians might have gotten jumpy. Thirdly, he had no way of knowing for absolute certain that they were the only two people in the house, despite the lack of any unaccounted-for vehicles in the garage and driveway. It was possible Liddy had brought the two little girls back home. Finally, he had no way of knowing whether or not he had somehow been detected already, or whether he would be detected on entry in some manner, and they would call the police. Good liberal that she was, Liddy would never allow Steve to own any guns, which her husband had gone along with for fear of the girls getting hold of a weapon and a subsequent tragic accident, but that could have changed along with Liddy’s sexual orientation. It was indeed a rushed job, maybe too rushed.
Zack pulled back the hood of the parka and then pulled down a dark navy blue ski mask, covering his face. He inserted the key in the front door, unlocked it, and carefully turned the knob. There was a brief sticking and then the tumblers fell softly. He pushed the door open. The chain was off, so he would not need the small pair of bolt cutters in his left back pocket. That’s a stroke of luck, he thought. They’re careless. Careless and arrogant. I’ll bet it simply never occurred to them that despite what they’re doing, anyone would dare to lift a finger to stop them. Why would it occur to them? Until a few weeks ago, no one’s ever fought back.
He pushed the door open and went in. The front hall was dark. Zack silently moved to the door of the living room and peeped around into the room. It was empty except for one lit table lamp. Zack mounted the carpeted stairs slowly, staying close to the wall so as not to make any boards creak. He knew where the bedroom was, the defiled bedroom where Steve and Liddy had slept as man and wife. The door to the girls’ room was open and he glanced in; in the very dim light filtering in through the window, he could see that the little beds were empty. Thank God, he thought to himself. Caity and Judy at least won’t have nightmares about terrible sounds and boogey men in masks from this night’s work. I wonder if they will ever be able to understand why, when they grow up? If I’m still around, if we win, I’m going to have to tell them one day that I killed their mother. I can’t shirk it. Damn! Better not think about it now.
Now Hatfield stood outside the master bedroom door. He could hear low, drowsy female voices from within, talking softly and casually. There was no sign of alarm; he had been as silent as the grave. Zack pulled two rubber ear plugs out of his pocket, lifted his mask and inserted them into his ears so the noise and concussion of the heavy bore gun going off in a closed room would not damage or rupture his ear drums. He slid the hammerless shotgun out and eased the safety off; it was ready to fire. He took a long deep breath, remembering Iraq, recovering the mindset needed to kill. This was different, he knew. The Indian bitch he didn’t give a damn about, but Liddy was a woman of his own race, a woman he’d known from Astoria High. They’d never had much in common, since even in high school Zack had been blue collar and right wing, and she had been wealthy by Astoria standards and lilac, Lifetime Channel trendy-left. But she was Steve’s wife, and so they’d spent some years at least being polite and halfway friendly to one another. Until she had gone mad and turned on his friend like a rabid dog, he’d had nothing against her. Could he do it? If I can’t, I’d damned well better find out before I meet with Red’s people, Zack said to himself.
Hatfield pushed open the door and stepped into the room, and in that room he found only enemies, targets to be destroyed. He could do it, and he did. Driving away from the house of the dead, back to Astoria, he knew he had been right to send that text message.
He drove to a spot he knew near Hammond, at the very mouth of the mighty river where it entered the ocean, a low cliff, and he pitched the shotgun and ammunition into the estuary. The parka and the shoe covers and gloves went into the black plastic garbage bag; they would be cut into strips and burned before morning. He stepped back inside the hardware store at 12 o’clock sharp. “How was lunch?” asked Ekstrom, glancing up from the desk in his office where he was scribbling on some inventory papers.
Charlie Washburn sat in a corner sipping from a large Styrofoam cup of latté from a late-night espresso stand. “Speaking of which, I got you a hoagie before Larissa’s Deli closed,” Washburn said, pointing to a paper-wrapped sandwich and a second cup of coffee beside a brown paper bag.
“Thanks,” said Zack, finding he was hungry. He unwrapped the sandwich and chomped down on it. “It’s done,” he said with his mouth full.
“Both of them?” Washburn asked.
“Both of them.”
“Any problems?” asked Ekstrom.
“Nope.”
“You write those letters on the wall?” Ekstrom persisted curiously.
“I did. Don’t know when they’ll find the bodies, but when they do I promise you’ll be able to hear the Daily Astorian scream in horror all the way down to Coos Bay.”
“Well, that’s that,” Washburn sighed.
“Not quite,” said Hatfield. “I think I’m going for a few encores.”
“What?” asked Ekstrom.
“Charlie, you remember last summer, that meeting I asked you to go to?” Hatfield reminded him. “The one where something suddenly came up and you backed out?”
“Yeah,” responded Washburn cautiously. “I can’t remember what it was that came up, now, exactly.”
“You probably had an outbreak of common sense. Anyway, don’t worry about it,” said Zack with a shrug. “That was last summer. Things are different now. I’ve got one last thing to say about tonight, and then if you guys want out, there will be no hard feelings, and who’s to say you’re not a hell of a lot smarter than I am? I won’t ever mention it again, but for now, just listen to me a bit. You both know that I know some people, and you’ve always avoided bringing up the subject. I appreciate your tact, and I never pushed it because I figured that once you knew, it was your choice whether or not you wanted to talk about it. But what happened in Coeur d’Alene has changed things. Now we know it can be done. We failed in Coeur d’Alene, but the Party hasn’t been destroyed. I know because I have been in contact with some people who escaped from CdA and who are still fighting, carrying on a guerrilla war to establish our own white country here in the Northwest. It’s going to be long and bloody and horrible, but we’re going to win.”
“How do you figure that?” asked Washburn curiously.
“Short answer? God is on our side,” said Zack simply.
“Oooo-kaaay…” said Washburn. “And you know this, how?”
“Because of what happened in Coeur d’Alene and what happened with me tonight,” Zack explained. “These things are God’s sign to us. Not whether we won or lost, or whether I screwed up somehow and I’m in jail looking at a double murder charge this time tomorrow night. That’s not what matters. What matters is that these things happened. That we did them. God has given the white man back his courage. The courage to stand up and defy our oppressors’ laws. The courage to fight back with weapons in our hands, instead of a computer keyboard. The courage to be men again, real courage that comes from our hearts and not from a can of cheap domestic beer or a whiskey bottle. We never had that before, up until now, and that’s why white men always lost. We were ashamed of who we were. We were ashamed to be who we are. No more. Guys like me and the Old Man and so many others have spent all our lives begging God on our knees to just do this one little thing for us, to give us back the courage that our ancestors had, even if it’s only for one last glorious defeat, so that we can die on our feet instead of live on our knees, and exit the stage of history with our heads held high. God has answered our prayers. We have our courage back now. I don’t know how it happened, but we’ve got it back. We got ours back when we did this thing tonight, because even though I was the trigger man, you guys stepped up to the plate just as much as I did. When I got to that house and I didn’t find cops waiting for me, and when I got back tonight and I found both of you still here, at your posts, instead of home hiding under the bed tossing a case of beer or a bottle of Jack down your throats to quiet your terror, you proved yourselves just as much as I did. God has given you back your courage too, guys, and either of you could have done my job tonight if you’d had to.”
Zack paused, took another bite of his sandwich, and then chewed and swallowed it. “Anyway, I’m going to meet with some people about joining the Northwest Volunteer Army and setting up a unit here. You guys want in?”
“Yes,” said Ekstrom, quietly and without hesitation.
“Yes,” said Washburn with a nod.
“Welcome to the lunatic fringe, boys,” said Hatfield.
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat.
No stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit,
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
If I know this, then know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene 3
The three friends met again in the watery gray twilight of a December afternoon, in the old Kiwanis Club beach shelter on the Washington side of the Columbia River, about a half a mile up Highway 401 from the gigantic bridge. The pre-fab building with the concrete floor was cold as a walk-in freezer inside, and the would-be insurgents kept their heavy winter coats and caps on, but it was enclosed and tight against the wind, and it had electricity. The hut contained several picnic tables and some plastic chairs, a ping-pong table leaning against the wall that could be laid across the picnic tables if anyone wanted to play, a sink, a battered old refrigerator, and some cupboards. The nearby beach was really just a small shelf of gravel instead of sand, but it served as a passable casting spot for fishermen and a good picnic place in the summer. As the early darkness descended they could see the Christmas lights starting to come on across the river in Astoria, twinkling green and red and white.
“I’ll get the heat going,” said Charlie Washburn, stoking up a propane stove in one corner and lighting all the burners. He found a large saucepan in one of the cupboards, filled it with water from the sink, and put it on one of the burners. “Instant coffee all around, I’d say. These cups look more or less clean, and I see we’ve still got some sugar and creamer left over from Labor Day. Okay, Zack, care to run tonight’s revelries by us again?”
“We’re going to meet a guy they’ve sent down from Olympia who’s called Mr. Chips,” Hatfield told them. “It goes without saying that he’s wanted by the law, and if we are so much as seen in his company we will all be marked men.”
“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. “He’s known Steve as long as we have. Rod Berry told me Ted was damned near crying when he had to come and get Steve and take him to jail on that damned bullshit warrant those two bitches swore out on him. He knew what the score was, and what Liddy and that dyke were doing to Steve and the girls. I don’t think he was too upset over being compelled to release Steve from jail, and I don’t think he’s looking any harder for the killers than the pressure from the PC establishment over there makes him look.” Hatfield gestured toward the lights of Astoria. “What I don’t understand is why no FBI involvement? Why no mention in the media of the letters NVA I scrawled on the bedroom wall in dyke squaw blood? Especially since they were all over Steve and his kids in the original hatespeech case?”
Washburn spoke up. “From what I gather from the news, the Bureau has a whole new set of priorities these days. Damn if you weren’t right about the NVA fighting on, Zack. I heard on the truck radio coming over here they tagged another couple of Mexicans in The Dalles and bombed a Portland Police Bureau patrol car at an intersection, with a nigger cop still in it.”
“Steve is out now, he’s back with his kids, and he has a chance to rebuild his life and theirs. That’s the important thing,” said Ekstrom. “It worked.”
“I guess Mr. Chips can bring us up to speed on what’s going on around the Northwest,” said Hatfield.
“And who exactly is this Mr. Chips?” asked Washburn.
“He’s a representative from the Party, and now I suppose from the NVA,” replied Hatfield. “He doesn’t really have a title. Few of them do. The Party has always avoided handing out Chief Cook and Bottle Washer monikers like some racial groups back in the old days used to do. It’s kind of like the Mafia. Let the Feds keep on guessing as to who does what. Chips is kind of a general factotum. He describes himself as a Johnny Appleseed who wanders the Pacific Northwest planting seeds of hate and hoping they’ll turn into big blooming orchards. I’ve met him before, back when the Party was legal and I went up to some meetings in the Olympia area, and also down in Dundee and Centralia, Washington. He’s one of the most knowledgeable and intelligent men I’ve ever met. When he speaks, we listen. If we want in on the revolution, then he’s the man who can get us in.”
From the gloom outside there came the sound of a vehicle pulling up outside, tires crunching on the gravel beach and a motor running. “That’s them,” said Hatfield, looking out the window. “Right on time. A good sign in a revolutionary. One thing, boys, if we ever do get into a shooting sitch. Four thirty means four thirty on the dot. One man out of position at the wrong time can kill us all. You can take that as my first lesson to you in combat skills.” The visitor they were waiting for had arrived in a battered and nondescript Subaru sports utility vehicle. In the falling darkness, Hatfield couldn’t tell if it was black or dark blue or green. Mr. Chips got out of the back seat. He was accompanied by a young man wearing a denim jacket and a tweed golf cap, and a tall young woman with a plain but strong-featured face and long orange-ish hair tied in a ponytail behind her head. The boy and the girl both appeared to be about 18 years old. Hatfield had met both of them before up in Dundee. Hatfield opened it and let the youth in. “Hey, Shane,” he said.
“Hey, Mr. H. How’s it going?” The young Volunteer stepped in and looked quickly around the hut. The Oregon men could see the butt of a Tec-9 machine pistol poking from a shoulder holster rig under his denim jacket. The woman stood in the door, wearing a tan fur-lined shepherd’s coat, and they could see the nubby barrel of an Uzi submachine gun protruding from the open coat, held respectfully pointed at the floor. “Hi, Rooney,” said Hatfield.
“Hey,” said the girl. The boy went to the door and beckoned, and a bespectacled man in late middle-age with a grizzled moustache stepped inside the room. He took off his overcoat. Under it he was wearing a green cardigan sweater and a tie with a light yellow pastel shirt. In the pocket of the shirt was a plastic protector containing several pens. He looked like a teacher or a computer geek.
“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 and tunnels so they can monitor traffic, so I figured we’d better meet here on the Washington side rather than cross the river. The damned things can’t always be avoided, but there’s no need to leave them a trail of bread crumbs. Shane and Rooney will stay outside and keep an eye out. A young couple in a parked car will need no explanation to any passers-by. By the by, I hope you men are armed and ready to use your weapons, because I should tell you that if anyone comes at us, we’re shooting our way out.” The boy and the girl turned around and left without another word, and Hatfield closed the door. “These gentlemen are..?”
“This is Charlie Washburn, and this is Lennart Ekstrom,” said Hatfield, indicating them. There were brief handshakes. “They’re good men. I’ve already trusted them with my life.”
“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.”
“Zack vouches for you,” said Washburn. “That’s good enough. I suppose we’d best get on with it, then. He’s told you what we want from you?”
“Yes, and some of the background. You would be amazed how common a story yours is, gentlemen.” Morehouse sat down and accepted a steaming hot cup of instant coffee, black, and waved away the proffered packets of creamer and sweetener. “They say that all politics is local. So is oppression, apparently. It requires a man to be personally affected by tyranny at his own front door before he will act. Sometimes not even then. 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 had some idea of what the Party was doing behind the scenes, of course, that preparations were being made. Some of it you told me, Red, and some of it I figured out for myself. I was starting to turn over in my own mind whether or not I wanted to join you when the time came to pick up the gun. 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. For almost a hundred years now we have been betrayed at every turn by the men we voted into office, and we have been ravaged and bled dry by these alien creatures called Jews. We have tried every single peaceful avenue of redress, every non-violent method we could think of to try and change the world, to try and make these sons of bitches wearing the suits stop doing what they are doing. None of it has worked worth a tinker’s damn. We have shouted and screamed NO at the top of our lungs, and we have been ignored and spat on and called haters for our trouble. 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 hated those hadjis because they were killing and maiming my friends and trying to do the same to me, but I knew in my heart that we had no business there, that the reason they were trying to kill and maim me was because I was trying to take from them their little patch of the world and the oil that was underneath it. I was a thief who had come into their home to rob them of their land and their goods and their dignity, and they had every right to try and shoot and bomb my ass off. To be honest, those Iraqis were doing what I would have been proud to see Americans do if we were ever invaded and occupied. We never said such things, of course, and most of us didn’t even think them out in our own minds in so many words, because we knew how dangerous those thoughts were, but we all knew that we were the guys in the black hats over there.
“I got back home and I somehow understood as I never had before that we are an occupied people. Occupied by our own government, occupied by the same goddamned Jews and politicians and business executives who sent me over to Iraq to steal what little those poor people have. Then came the business with Steve and Liddy King, when I used the skills ZOG gave me for my friend and for his children, for my own people and not for a monthly paycheck from the Jews. It felt right. I find that I like the feel of that white hat on my head, and I want to keep it there. That’s not very articulate, Red, but that’s the best I can tell you right now.”
“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, as conceited and arrogant as that sounds. I couldn’t do it alone, but Coeur d’Alene changed everything for me. Now I know that there are others, others who see the things I see and read them the same way, who think and feel as I do, who understand that it’s a truly wonderful gift from God to be born white. I saw what happened in Coeur d’Alene on CNN, but I don’t want to watch the rest of this great thing on television. I have to be here tonight, Mr. Morehouse. I have to be part of this. I don’t think I could walk away if I wanted to.”
“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, it’s a Rocky Horror Picture Show that just goes on and on. Somewhere, sometime, it has to stop, at least in some part of the country, and here in the Northwest is the best place for that. Once you accept in your own mind that things have to change, you don’t sit and reflect and introspect and brood and agonize over it. You just do what has to be done.”
“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. We are going to finish what began in Coeur d’Alene two months ago. The media is now crowing that the so-called racist republic is dead. It is not. The Northwest American Republic exists. It exists because we say it does, and because we are willing to spill the blood of others and to give up our own lives to make good on what we say. That is how nations come to life in the world, gentlemen. I am a representative of that Republic, of its provisional government in the present form of the Army Council until we can establish a state under the draft constitution we’ve been keeping in our drawers for so long. In that capacity, I am asking you to enlist in the armed forces of that Republic and fight a war of liberation against a cruel and wicked tyrant. Will you do so?”
“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. We got hundreds of thousands of organic migrants here to the Northwest that way.”
“Oh, yeah, I think we’ve got half the population of California living in Clatsop County,” said Washburn. “Most of those same people pull the straight Democratic ticket lever in the polling booth, and they’d cut off their own goolies rather than admit that they came here looking for a whiter and safer environment.”
“Mmm hmm,” said Morehouse with a chuckle. “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 ever since the economy went south under Bush Two and never recovered, when Social Security and Medicare went under, and when the neocons finally had to bring back the draft. You can’t conquer the world without a huge army; all their high-tech toys and smart bombs and computerized weapons of mass death simply wouldn’t serve. If we were going to keep that fossil fuel pumping, the Middle East had to be actually occupied, and so now every American family with a male child knows that when their boys turn 18 there is a good chance they’re going to be dragged away to the desert and butchered. Everyone knows at least one young man who came back from Iraq or Saudi wounded or crippled, minus an arm or a leg, or blind, or insane. And of course 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. “We vote in some white guy in a blow-dried hair do, with a bright smile and a thousand-dollar suit, then as soon as he hits Washington he betrays us, and all we get is more Mexicans, more crime, more taxes and fewer jobs, and all our savings gone on medical bills because nobody has any insurance anymore, and more dead kids coming back in coffins that no one is allowed to photograph. Surelywe’re not that stupid? This isn’t an overnight development. This has been going on for 50 years. 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. “As for our failure to resist this genocide by force of arms before, it’s of course tempting to put it down to cowardice plain and simple, and there has always been a lot of that in what passed for a white resistance movement, to be sure. Way too much of it. Not to mention the fact that most of our self-appointed leaders were little more than con-men who didn’t have the chops to make it as televangelists. 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, dragging out a filthy old pipe from his pocket and beginning to stuff it with tobacco. “The white man can still show physical courage, yes. Lots of it. That courage gene is definitely still there in our makeup. But 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. It needs us and we need it, psychologically. White males are addicted to social approval nowadays. We need it like an addict needs his crack pipe. We’ve got to have that supportive peer group around us yelling attaboy. We can be brave in a structured environment, so long as it is an officially approved form of courage, and so long as afterwards we can belly up to the bar and talk drunken shit with the boys and get slapped on the back, and then go home to the little woman and the comfortable middle class lifestyle from which we have ventured out, however briefly.
“The white man can face danger, but he can’t face loneliness,” Morehouse went on, lighting his pipe with a match from a paper book. “He can’t handle being away from the comforting herd. He can’t handle being out in front anymore. He’s lost there. The pioneer spirit is all but dead; you would have to have lived through those bleak times in the early 2000s like I did, before those first hundred people Came Home and built the Party, to understand how rare the true pioneer, the trail-blazer, the man or woman who can go first, has become among us. 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 can venture into the forest and do battle for our masters, but we can’t live in the dark wood and make it our home and kingdom anymore, hunting on our own and keeping our entire kill for ourselves. We must always return to the master’s warm fire and his doggie treats, and of course his collar and his leash. 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. There are more now, a lot more. We’ve got six of them here tonight. Four in here and two very fine young people out in the car.”
“Red, I’m not so stupid as to ask how many men are in the Northwest Volunteer Army…” began Ekstrom.
“I couldn’t tell you even if you asked,” interposed Morehouse. “No one knows how many Volunteers there are, and I doubt anyone ever will know.”
“But how many men do you think it’s going to take to get this job done?” persisted Ekstrom. “To create our own country here and make it good? To drive out the federal authority?”
“Far fewer than you might think,” Morehouse told them. “Our victory, gentlemen, will be the ultimate victory of quality over quantity. The American régime is not invincible, you know. The Muslims have shown us that, in spades. Bear in mind, gentlemen, that we are facing an opponent who passed the top of his game a long, long time ago. We will be the tiny lion against the enormous snake, but the serpent is old and sick and dying, poisoned with its own crapulence. We are facing a putrid mass of corruption, incompetence, bureaucracy and sloth, quavering with senility, an enemy who already is maintaining an army of almost two million men around the globe in an attempt to create and maintain an empire containing all of the world’s petroleum reserves. American soldiers are engaged in trying to keep that rickety empire together from Venezuela to Tehran, and very few if any will be available to pull back here to fight against us.”
“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. “Well, I can tell you, having seen the military from the inside, that the Army and Marines ain’t anywhere as mighty as they once were. And do you seriously think the Americans will abandon Iraq and Israel and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and cut themselves off from their own oil supply to drop a million men on a handful of partisans in the Pacific Northwest, and maintain that level of occupation in a part of the world that is just as much a foreign country to those East Coast and L.A.-centric Jews and intelligentsia as Iraq ever was? The ruling élite all consider the Northwest to be a minor backwater.”
“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 and loyalist vigilante groups. And of course the black and Mexican gangs in the cities who may be sworn in as special U.S. Marshals or something of the kind when the shit really hits the fan. And the media, of course. Our enemy will be fragmented, disorganized, poorly coordinated in his many arms and agencies, and like all federals, each group will be jealous of its own turf and resources. They won’t work well together, they’ll trip over one another’s shoelaces, and they will fight us just as incompetently as they fought against the Iraqis and Iranians.”
“I’ve had to work with the federal government in the Forestry Department for years,” said Washburn. “I can tell you, the people in charge of us are fucking idiots. They break down just trying to establish a coherent forest firefighting plan, and don’t even get me started on FEMA. Get somebody actually shooting at these bureaucrats, and they’ll fall to pieces.”
“Exactly,” agreed Morehouse. “The reality is that for the first few months and years, we won’t be coming up against anybody that we can’t outshoot in a clutch, if our gunners can stay cool and calm and sober, keep the initiative in our hands, hunt them instead of letting them hunt us, and put some guts behind our guns. 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. Remember those long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East? Many of our Volunteers will be military veterans who have been under fire on the other end of the stick, and man for man they’ll be every bit the personal equal or better than some pot-bellied highway patrolman or affirmative action FBI bitch in a feminist business suit.”
“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. “All right. I’m going to give you guys the theory here, all nice and neat. In reality, of course, nothing about this war is going to be nice and neat, but I am going to create a scenario for you that will at least approximate how we will win the Northwest American Republic, so you can get a glimpse of the possibilities. Assume we have intelligent and determined leadership. Assume we can get Volunteers with strong character and courage. Assume we can formulate a coherent battle plan and tactics, and add a generous dollop of good old fashioned luck from the God of Battles. Those things acquired, and remembering how essentially weak and hollow the enemy really is, 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. And women, lest we forget.”
“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 in the cities and Jesse James style in the countryside. We will be fighting high tech with low tech, and low tech is the one thing the United States has never known how to beat.” 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. Our heart and our spirit can defeat their cruelty and their treachery and their lies, but only if we are fortified with strength and pride and faith in the justice of our cause. Our Volunteers must be like the soldiers of Oliver Cromwell, who said he wanted simple men of labor and the land, who know why they fight, and love what they know. ZOG could never beat the barefoot brown man with his AK-47. Neither will they be able to beat the white man of the Northwest in his pickup truck, his blue jeans and his baseball cap, with a pistol stuck in his belt and a backpack full of Semtex, on the rainy streets of Seattle or out in the backwoods of Idaho.”
“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, who can pull a trigger or thumb a radio detonator and not worry about it afterwards. The guys who can go the distance and do this for year after long bloody year. The guys with a bottomless reserve of sheer guts.”
“You got it,” agreed Morehouse with a nod. “I can outline for you a structure for a revolutionary armed force that will work a treat against the enemy we will be facing. I can give you a strategy that will win us our own nation, and I can describe to you the tactics that will keep us alive and free and fighting while putting the enemy and his minions six feet under every time. But what I cannot do is to make you brave. 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. It’s still there, comrades, and every man and woman of us who wants to change the world must search for it in their hearts and their souls. They must find it and feed it, blow on it, nurture it until it bursts into flame again.”
“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. If the only alternative to ongoing insurgency is the complete destruction of their own empire, ZOG will simply absorb whatever we dish out and hang on to the wreckage like drowning rats. A country as huge as the whole United States of America could absorb such a bloodletting as I have described, as traumatic as it would be, if it was scattered all ove