Martin Vail 03 - Reign in Hell

by Diehl, William

  When I was twelve, Pa let me come to the meetings. First time I ever saw a AK-47 was when Major Orin come to the house with a bunch of other fellas and he was carryin’ one slung down from his shoulder under his arm. We drove out to the breaks and he let me shoot it. It was somethin’ else, shootin’ that piece. I got to tell you, I was almighty impressed. That Major made me feel like a man, like I was all growed and part of it even though I was just a kid.

  The talk was always the same. We hated the government ’cause they wanted to take away our weapons. We hated the Jews ’cause they controlled the banks and the money. We hated the United Nations ’cause they was being readied to become the world police force and they were comin’ into this country to take down anybody who didn’t believe the way the government said to believe. We talked about robbin’ banks and armories and stock-pilin’ weapons, and the Major talked about how the government made up the story about all the Jews Hitler killed and how the pictures of all them bodies stacked up was shot in Hollywood where the Jews owned all the movie studios, so that people’d feel sorry for them. We called the President and the Congress traitors and we called ourselves patriots and I was real impressed at bein’ considered one of them. And we hated the tax man who could come and take away your house without so much as a howdy-dee-do. Major Orin called the IRSers a buncha low-bred kikes who couldn’t get a job anywheres else and who lived off the public tit and treated everybody bad because they wasn’t worth nothing themselves.

  One such visitor we had was called Eddie Dukes and he was from down South somewheres and had a tattoo on his arm of a dagger with KKK on the handle. He spoke about the four B’s, which was “Bibles, bullets, beans, and bandages,” and I believed it all. Everything they said. They’d leave their little paper books for us to read and I had a whole shelf of them in my bedroom. They taught survival tactics and weaponry and there was one book called Satan’s Kids which said how the Bible proves the Jews and nigras are God’s fallen people and should be slaves. I remember it quotin’ Revelations Two: I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan. Pa would quote from another book which was called The Bible Answers Racial Questions and his favorite was from Ezra Nine: Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons, nor seek their peace or their wealth forever: that ye may be strong and eat the good of the land. My favorite of all the books was The Aryan Warrior, which was about survival and weapons and how to stance whilst shootin’ and makin’ foxholes and the like. One summer I went out to the breaks and dug myself a foxhole and I had my pack with some hardtack and my canteen and my thirty-ought-six and I stayed there for two days shootin’ at Jews and nigras and government traitors—which was really rocks and the like.

  My pa hated two things more than anything else and that was Jews and the tax man. When I was fourteen and Lorraine was nineteen she run off and married Ben Zimmerman ’cause she knew Pa would have no truck with her ynarryin’ a Jew. They had been goin’ together on the sly for a couple years while Ben was in college, and when he’d come home for the weekend they’d go off and shack up somewhere and Pa never knew anything about it nor did I. She tried to talk about it with him and he went into a rage. He was slammin’ his fist on the dining room table and callin’ her a whore and the like. The next day she was gone and she left a note but he never spoke to her or about her again. But one night soon after she was gone I woke up and heard all this racket downstairs and I went down and there was Pa, sitting in the living room with no lights on, just the fire in the fireplace with a bucket between his feet and he was smashin’ all the framed pictures of her and lettin’ the glass and frames drop in the bucket and he was burnin’ her pictures in the fireplace. I never seen him look so ferocious. I don’t know where she is neither, I ain’t seen her since she left.

  Pa refused to pay taxes because like he said it was just money goin’ to the Jewboys who had the government by the throat. Finally they come after him. They was about ten, fifteen of them and they threw our things out front of the house, they took the ranch and sold it and sent my pa to the federal pen in Kansas. I was sixteen then and just afore he went away he sent me to Arkansas to live with the Posse at a compound they had in the Ozarks. I never saw my pa again for there was this riot at the prison which were the whites and the nigras havin’ it out and they stabbed him to bits with a screwdriver. I hated them all. Hated the nigras and the kikes and the spies, I hated every last one of them for what they did to us and to my pa.

  Reverend Zeke Longfellow, who was a leader of the Posse, adopted me, and from then on I was schooled in the Bible and the Constitution and history and the like for a couple of hours a day, then in the afternoons we would train in survival and guerrilla tactics. I learned how to make grenades and short-barrel a shotgun and where the kill points are on the human body and the making of bombs and incendiaries, and we was taught how to take out bridges and telephone relay stations and radio station towers and airports and fuel storage tanks. Hit and run, hit and run, that was the big thing. In the summer we went off to camp in the north—Colorado, Montana, Idaho—and they would cut us loose in the mountains with nothin’ but a knife and a canteen and we would have to find our way back and eat off the land whilst we was at it. I loved it all.

  When I was eighteen, the Reverend sent me to the Army and I ended up in the 82nd Airborne and he give me the name of a man to contact when I got to Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He was a sergeant—name was Schmidt, Barry Schmidt—and he was a skinhead. They was about forty of us there and I fit right in. Had me a Nazi flag in my footlocker and I wore a Nazi Iron Cross on a chain around my neck. We wore our hair real short and we dressed alike when we was off the base. Jeans and bomber jackets, red suspenders, and black combat boots with red, white, or purple laces. We hung out in this bar called the Roving Eye and they had a back room which was like our private club. We’d get drunk, and the strippers would come back and perform for us and do other stuff.

  Schmidt had this house off base and we’d go over there and read his Nazi literature and watch newsreels about Hitler on his video. He had a cold cellar and he had about five thousand rounds of small-caliber ammunition down there and more than a pound of explosives and blasting caps and smoke grenades. He’d give us orders for stuff and we’d steal it from the base and he’d pay us to do that.

  And on Saturday night sometimes we’d go on huntin’ trips. That’s what we called it, huntin’ trips. We’d scope us out a fag or a porch weasel, which is one of the ways he called niggers, or a Jesus killer, and we’d egg ’em on and pick a fight and beat ’em up good. Then this one night we was in this small town near the base, they was five of us and Schmidt, who had a souped-up Firebird, and we see this nigger PFC and he’s walkin’ down the street with a white girl. Schmidt says, “Lookit that ugly fuckin’ jungle bunny with a blond girl.” He stops and we pile out and chase the girl off and the jig begins to get scared, he’s sayin’ to leave him alone and he wants to leave but we crowded around him. Then Barry gets a rope outta the car and he fashions himself a noose and we sling it around this nigra’s head and he goes to screamin’ and Barry pulls the knot tight and cuts off his voice. I never seen nobody as scared as that nigra soldier was. His eyes was big as a fry pan and he takes to cryin’ and then Schmidt says, “You lousy coward, die like a man” and he throws the other end of the rope over a tree limb and ties his hands behind his back. He says to me and one of the other boys to grab the rope with him and then we just, you know, just hauled him up off the ground and tied the rope to the tree and he was hangin’ there, legs jumpin’ and twirlin’ around and he’s gaggin’ for breath. We stood there for the longest time while he hung there jerkin’ on the end of that rope and finally he stopped and he fell real still and we piled back in the car and drove away. Next day it’s all over the base that this nigger soldier was lynched and they’re sayin’ it was the Klan. Nobody said anything. None of us was scared or worried about it. Far as I know, they never did arrest an
ybody for that.

  When I got discharged, I went back to Arkansas. That’s when I first heard about the Sanctuary. Reverend Zeke sent me up there. He said they was startin’ an army and it was right down my alley. I was taken into the Church of Zorepath, which is one of the army brigades. There’s four of them, each one a brigade in the Army of the Sanctuary. The preacher was Major Metzinger. I was made a lieutenant and I was feelin’ big about that. They was organized, not like the Posse or the Nations, for the General had a vision. When I first met the General I thought, This is a real war hero. He stood there, straight as a phone pole with a voice like an avalanche and he says to me, “Son, the Lamb of God who died for our sins is returning to judge sin as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. We are rising in power and anointing, which the gates of Hell shall not prevail against, which no man shall stand up to, which no enemy shall smother, which no kingdom can resist.” He was saying that directly to me and it brought to mind Revelations Ten: And I saw a mighty angel come down from Heaven, clothed with a cloud: And a rainbow was upon his head, and His face was as it were the sun, and His feet as pillars of fire: And He had in his hand a little book open: and He set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, and he cried out with a loud voice, as when the lion roareth: and when He cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. It returned me to the Bible. It got me back to scripture. It got me back to the good life.

  We trained hard. For some of us it was a full-time job. Every weekend we trained in town and once a month we’d go up to Yahweh, spend a couple days in survival and layin’ mines, stringin’ razor wire, sniper-shootin’, alterin’ weapons, like that. It’s a hell of an army. Even the women are tough and know what they’re doin’. The instructors are exSEALs, ex-Berets. They’re pros at stealth missions and tracking and guerrilla tactics. The General talks about Parousia and A-Day. They have mockups of banks and armored cars and armories and shopping centers and government buildings, everything. The control center has the best electronics equipment you can imagine. Computers, video cameras, satellite things, I don’t even understand a lot of it. I heard they have a radio studio and a bunker full of weapons and ammunition. I never seen that, but I have seen AK-47s and Polish Skorpiens and other outlaw guns bein’ used. There’s a special group called the I.F., the Invasion Force, which is made up of the commanders of the brigades and handpicked experts which plan what they call sorties, which can mean anything from a bank to an armory to a shopping mall or gun store. And they got Brother Abraham who is spreading the word.

  They also got Colonel Shrack, who’s the head of the I.F. and who is the best officer I ever met but he’s cold-blooded as hell. About a year ago I was asked to join an I.F. force for a sortie. It was the National Guard armory in Helena. They had planned this job to a fare-thee-well. They knew exactly what they wanted and where it was located. They knew where the guards were, telephone lines, radio equipment, they knew everything. We had a mock-up of the building with toy autos and we ran through the operation over and over while Metzinger clocked us with a stop watch. We had mock-ups of the power box and phone network for the experts to practice on. Nothing was left to chance.

  There was only three men on duty that night. Usually there was four, but one of them, which was really one of our boys, stayed home sick at the last minute. We set up a diversion. It was timed just perfect. There was two men on the phone and power lines, another one to go straightaways in and make sure the radio and computers were down, two men who faked a fender bender in front of the main door, a driver and a shotgun in the van, four guys to get in, open the doors, and load up the stuff. Twelve in all, counting the man who stayed home and the commander of the operation, which was Metzinger, my preacher, and I guess that’s how come I was asked in because he was my C.O. Metzinger was on the roof of a building about a block away with high-powered glasses, directing things because he had full view of the whole field of operation. I drove one of the fender benders and also jumped on the van and helped load. It went off like clockwork. Nobody got hurt, and we got what we went for, which was mainly C-4, grenade machine guns, steel jacket—that’s bullets—a couple of grenade launchers, and a handheld missile launcher. The whole operation went down in six minutes. The guards was left duct-taped, hands, feet, and mouths. It was two hours before anybody even realized the lights and all was off By that time we was long gone. The take was hidden in cars on an auto transport Eight Toyotas. We… they own the transport and we… they got three car dealers in the army.

  But after it was over some of the boys commenced to drinking and wanted to go to a whorehouse and it was like, they forgot all about what it was about, that it was a Christian war we was fightin’ and we had to do it by the Book.

  Then I got invited on another one, this time a bank job, and Metzinger told me they were checking me out to see if I was good enough for the I.F. because I done real good on the armory job. I was real thrilled about that. The bank job was a long way off. Denver. And from the start it gave me the worries. First off, it was a small operation—five men. A driver, which was me, three men in the bank, one outside with the radio, which was the commander of the job. He was a guy I didn’t know. We went through the whole routine with the mock-up and everything just like the armory job and then we went into Denver to case the bank and make sure everything was cool.

  It was two nights before the job. That night they all got roaring drunk and had women up to the rooms and they was up whoring and drinkin’ all night long. It got me worried. I mean, to do a job like that everybody’s gotta be in top form. Next day they went out to check out the escape routes and all and I stayed back at the hotel. We always kept one man in the hotel HQ when we did an overnight. I was sittin’ there looking out the window and there was this movie playin’ across the street that everybody said was a big lie. It was called Schindler’s List and it was about the Jew murders during World War Two. I kept staring down at the theater and thinking about all the hell-raisin’ they had been doin’ so I sneaked across the street and watched the movie. Most of it was in black and white and that was the part about the concentration camps and all and I thought, What a lotta bunk this is, but then at the end all these old people came up and gave witness. That part was in color. And I knew then that it was true. These people wasn’t in any Hollywood studio, they was in Israel and they was outside. They gave witness and I started believing them and then I knew it was a big lie, all that stuff about the government and all. And I knew the bank job was gonna go sour, I knew that in my heart.

  So I walked out of the theater and I went to the government building and there was a marshal’s office there, so I went in and there sat Mr. Firestone. I told him I’d give him the whole story but they would sure as hell kill me and I needed to go into the protection program. And I told him I wouldn’t do no testifying once I was in because they’re everywhere and you leave the nest they’ll find you. And then like the cherry on a sundae, I give up the bank job. You probably remember about that. They was waiting when the I.F. got there and there was a big shootout, three of them went down and the other one was caught and got life but he never give up that they were an I.F. with the Sanctuary. And I come here. The government bought me this farm and gives me twenty-five thousand a year. I joined the church and that’s where I met Marie and we was married six months ago. That’s my story.

  Vail was struck by the stoic monotone with which Ralph told his horror story. He showed no emotion or remorse in telling it. It was as if he were reciting the menu in a restaurant. Vail had taken no notes. He took a sip of coffee and stared at Ralph, who looked at Vail’s chin.

  “What does Engstrom mean when he talks about Parousia?” Vail asked.

  “It’s when Christ returns to earth. The second coming.”

  “And what is A-Day?”

  “Armageddon Day. The day of the last great battle between good and evil.”

  “Is the Sanctuary planning a great battle on A-Day?”

  “Yes sir, that’s what I suppos
e.”

  “And that’s what he’s preparing for? That’s what the army is all about, stealing weapons, robbing banks, getting ready for the big day.”

  “I’m just guessing that’s what it means.”

  “So the General is never explicit about that?”

  “No sir, he has never said exactly when all this will take place.”

  “Or where?”

  “No sir. Don’t you see? It’s gonna be a holy war.”

  “And A-Day is when it’s going to start?”

  “I guess that’s it.”

  “Like Hitler’s war. The Third Reich was the Third Crusade in his mind. He exterminated millions of people in the name of Jesus Christ, Ralph, did you know that?”

  “Well, yes sir, I’d heard some of that.”

  “And if we bring the General into court, you refuse to give testimony?”

  “I made that deal up front,” he answered nervously, and looked at Firestone for corroboration. The marshal didn’t respond at first. After all, this was Vail’s show. Finally Firestone said, “We did have that understanding.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Vail snapped. “You’ve got a nice place here, Ralph. A lot of people live on less than the government sends you and Marie every month. You don’t feel you owe something for that?”

  “I give up a lot already,” he answered.

  “What have you given up? A lot of talk? Life in the Sanctuary? You committed cold-blooded murder in North Carolina, Ralph, and armed robbery at the armory in Helena. The government has conveniently overlooked that. Now you’re on top of Engstrom’s hit list. They’ll put a bullet in you and Marie in a flat second. They have no feeling for you anymore. You’re dead meat in their book. But you feel it’s fair to live forever off the government and not help stop Engstrom’s madness?”

  “It ain’t—” Ralph started, and then caught himself.