“That we’d all be safe if we agreed to join the ethnostate,” Emma explained. “If not, he said we’d be deported in the truck.”
“Deported, eh? Shades of Belsen and Treblinka,” said Cabot. “It’s enough to make you puke. Those motherfuckers…” He caught himself. “Damn, sorry, kids.”
“It’s fine,” said Jacob breezily. “Besides, you’re right. Burridge truly is a motherfucker.” Neither of his parents had the heart to chastise him. “He was shouting and announcing things, but then Mr. Cobb saw the guy fiddling under the truck dashboard, and he told him to stop but he wouldn’t, so... It was unbelievably noisy,” Jacob recalled with a shudder. “The other three ran away after that.”
Cabot and Cody gave an undramatic, somber report on their mission to the pharmacy. Neither could ignore the contrast in outcomes; while all but one of the team were quickly reunited with family and friends, Bethany’s torrential sadness would be audible for the rest of the night.
“We got work to do,” said Cabot, standing. “And not a lot of time.”
34
1.4 miles east of the Russell Homestead Day 11
So, it was decided: they would go in tonight.
Burridge had planned his briefing in some detail, and the rest knew to hold their questions until the end. On the floor at their feet was a mock-up of the homestead, with stick boxes representing five cabins in a horseshoe around the fire pit, flanked by gardens to the south and small outbuildings to the north. The whole property backed onto the road to the west, and it was there that Burridge saw their opportunity.
“They’re gonna expect us from the east, and maybe from north and south, but not from the west. They’ll be weak there, maybe only a listening post with some of their noisy little girls, ready to holler if they see anything,” he speculated, gaining a chuckle from the group. “So, we approach by stealth, after nightfall. Slip past them or neutralize any posts you find.” He dragged a stick through the dirt to show the path of the assault, a curve which led around the south side of the camp and toward the main gate, and then another to the north. “We pincer their weak point,” explained Burridge. “And while they’re busy responding to that, trying to figure out how many we are, looking in the wrong direction… we hit them hard from the east.”
Everyone wanted to understand their rules of engagement, but Crisco put it simplest: “We gonna kill everybody?”
“If they ain’t armed, they can live. We’re gonna run ‘em out of the place and dump them in Canada or someplace. The others, anyone that gives resistance, they’re fair game.”
Hoots and shouts greeted this news. The group had coalesced around their shared anger at the death of Big Dog (whose real and rather more pedestrian name was Kevin Alcott, though none of them knew that), a bond which had been hardened by more recent events. “Time for some payback,” said Crisco, whose own appellation referenced his years spent as a fry cook in a down-home diner on Route 16.
“It’s 3:30,” Burridge announced. “Rehearsal at five. Weapons check at seven. Move out at nine, then lay low near the target. Assault begins at 3 am. We’ll use the time for scouting, and gradually moving closer in. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” said Paleface, standing by his buddy Redbeard, as usual. “What about the women?”
“Usual rules apply,” Burridge cautioned. “No mistreatment.”
“But there’s this one blond chick who just showed up there,” Paleface continued. “Ran into them on patrol, and she gave us a bunch of backchat.”
“You wanna shoot a teenager for cussing you out?” asked Conrad. He was among the more reasonable members of the group, though naturally, that was relative.
“Who said I was gonna shoot her?” Paleface grinned lasciviously.
“No mistreatment,” Burridge repeated. “I see you breaking that rule, you’re off the team.”
Threatening his troops with abandonment and isolation was Burridge’s most powerful motivator; beyond anything, he knew, these young men sought comradeship and thrived on the ideological glue that came from regular, collective reaffirmations of their beliefs. It was this kinship that drove their desire for revenge; four men with backgrounds and beliefs broadly similar to their own had now fallen into battle with these homesteaders; such transgressions against the ethnostate and its proponents could not go unpunished.
“No fuckin’ around, fellas,” said Burridge. “We do this right and we get ourselves a nice, cozy place to live. No more tents in the wilderness, no more getting evicted ‘cause the landowner is a bleeding-heart liberal…”
“Fuck that guy,” opined several men at once.
“We get what we deserve. A proper roof over our heads, some decent food, and a place to call our own. These tree-hugging, tofu-eating assholes don’t deserve to be there. Once they’re gone, we can invite other groups…”
“Yeah!” Skip enthused. “We can bring in the Buffalo Atomwaffen members. They’d love it here.”
“And you’d love having Susie Sampson around,” Redbeard guffawed. Six-one, Amazonian, and unforgettable, Susie was the Buffalo-based, hard-right group’s main recruiting asset.
“Hell, who wouldn't?” laughed Skip. “She puts the fun in fundamentalist.”
“I watched her pretty much scoop out a dude’s eyeball once because he kept staring at her across the bar,” said Angelo, another past visitor to Buffalo.
“If his eye had been blue,” argued Burridge, “she’d have probably allowed him to keep it.” Without question, the gawker’s race had played a decisive role.
“All right, enough bullshit,” decided Burridge. “Let’s go over the plan again, then get a dress rehearsal going. Skip and Tyvey, you’re the A-force. Where are you gonna be?”
“South hook,” Tyvey replied. He was probably the oldest of the eight men but had no leadership ambitions whatsoever. “Press toward their gate, then assault the compound along with B-and C-forces.”
“Good. Which means Conrad and Crisco in B-force will be…” he elicited.
“Up north, hooking around in the same way. Put pressure on their defenses, if any, then push in to encircle.”
“All right. And that leaves Paleface, Redbeard, Angelo, and me to assault the camp from the east.” Expressed on the forest floor with sticks and twigs, the plan seemed simple and concise, but Burridge knew the remaining homesteaders would not yield without serious pressure. “We got ourselves a special weapon,” he said, nodding to Angelo, who would have responsibility for what he hoped was a game-changer. “We pour it on, and continue until everyone’s disarmed, hands in the air, or confirmed KIA.”
“Dealer’s choice,” said Crisco, spoiling for blood. “I cannot fuckin’ wait to get in there.”
“Keep your powder dry. Control your thoughts. Breathe easy. We got this,” Burridge told them, making eye contact with each man. “The plan is good. We just need to execute.”
35
Shock and Awe The Russell Homestead
0255h
The two girls looked straight into each other’s eyes and listened like they never had before. Something was moving, perhaps very slowly, only a few dozen yards from their position. Hidden behind a greenery wall of bracken and branches, Hope and Fern scarcely breathed as the sound came gradually closer. They had their instructions, and they would follow them, though they were scared. Without a sound, Fern mouthed a countdown… three, two, one…
They sprang from their hiding place and bolted as fast they could toward camp, Fern ringing the dinner bell for all she was worth. “Contact, contact!” she yelled, over and over, as she’d been told by Cabot. “South OP has contact!”
“Look alive, folks!” cried Ezra Cobb. He positioned himself on the stoop of the main cabin, his trusty shotgun loaded and ready. “Cabin five, look south and report.”
The southernmost building, cabin five, was home to the Margoles family. Hope and Fern barreled into the cabin and dashed straight for their mother, Mira. “What did you hear, babe?” she asked her
elder daughter.
“Sounded like someone crawling along the ground,” Hope recalled. “But he didn’t do anything when we ran off, so maybe he was trying to keep quiet?”
Mira stood only a half-inch over five feet, but she was a formidable defender of both her rights and her family. Alone since her husband had decided that his law firm’s buxom HR manager offered a more scintillating relationship prospect, Mira had already steeled herself against the coming assault, and her personal AR-15 was fitted with a low-light scope which could have been invented for these conditions.
“Tracking movement,” she whispered to Fern, who remained with her to relay messages. “Tell Mr. Cobb and Mr. Cabot that we’ve got one or two men approaching from the south, still about eighty yards south of the garden.”
“Roger,” Fern said and was instantly away.
The movement was steady, the men making slow progress toward an observation or firing position, she couldn’t yet tell. Both had blackened their faces—she almost guffawed at the irony—but they spoiled the effect by crawling like new recruits, with their asses high in the air.
“I don’t know who’s coming,” Mira said to herself, “but they ain’t the Special Forces, that’s for damned sure.”
Noise erupted on the other side of camp. “Contact! North OP has enemy contact!” Both Penny and Maddy sang out the warning as they retreated like sprinters in an Olympic final, speeding away from the movement they spotted near their OP just north of the gate.
“Good girls,” said Cobb. He lifted his shotgun and strode through to the back door of the main cabin, taking cover behind the woodshed. But his young partner was nowhere to be seen. “Max?”
“Here, sir,” the teenager replied. He had turned himself into the classic “talking tree,” with branches and leaves obscuring his outline so well that Cobb briefly doubted the boy was there at all. “I see them in my scope,” he whispered. “Seventy yards.” They were crouched in a pair by a tree, perhaps discussing how best to get closer to the camp, or what they might do about the shouts of alarm that were already raised. From Cobb’s viewpoint, the enemy had just screwed up in the same way twice. Then he heard Mira imposing herself on the southern visitors.
“Attention! I’m addressing the two men in the bushes near my location. Halt and stay where you are.” There was a cessation of movement, but it soon restarted. “I have a clean shot, and if you don’t stop approaching my home, I’m gonna kill you. Be advised; there are children in the house.”
In the north, Bryce felt he had a bead on his two assailants. “That’s far enough, assholes!” he said. “Stand up and set your weapons aside.”
Cabot came through to the back and checked in with Cobb. “Probes from north and south, but we got eyes on them,” said Cabot. “We’ll keep ‘em where they are.”
All of this was audible to Cody and Mary, who had taken positions in the upstairs rooms of their cabin. To Cody, something was missing; if the Nazis were serious about capturing the camp, it would take much more than a couple of two-man probes. The main assault had to be coming, and it only made sense that they’d hit the cabins themselves.
“Still nothing,” he said from his eastward-facing eerie at the window. The whole camp was dark, the better to let their eyes adjust to the night and to deny the enemy clues as to the defenders’ whereabouts. “The kids okay?”
“Yes, but I’d give anything to get them out of here,” said Mary. “This could get really nasty.”
“We’ll be fine, mom,” said Jacob. “You told us what to do.” Covering all the bases, Mary had instructed her children on how to react if they were captured by the Nazis: “Be compliant. Don’t get them mad. Follow their orders but look for every chance to escape and get help.”
Jacob had taken it in stride, but Emma chastised her mother for raising the prospect of life without their parents. “Remember to think positive,” she told her mother, who was bemused and impressed by turns at her daughter’s growing maturity. “We’re survivors. We’ll be okay.”
Warning shots came from the south; Mira had seen the men continue their approach and would stand steadfast in defense of cabin five, everyone knew. To her north-east was cabin four, where Henry Ottershaugh was in a prepared firing position with his hunting rifle; the shattered, tearful Bethany was trying to rest upstairs, but Henry knew the time for his grief was not now. He’d known Cobb and Cabot for twenty years—on and off—and they would depend on him as much as anyone. Right now, he was tracking Mira’s engagement with the southern pair, but could not yet see them through his more antiquated scope.
Mira sent three more rounds over the advancing men’s heads, and then in counterpoint, Max lit up the northern pair with a choice selection of shots. “Stay down, or just fuck off, I don’t really care,” he muttered in their direction. Beside him, Cobb felt the reassuring, cold metal of his shotgun and wondered how soon it would necessarily turn hot.
For his part, waiting for the main act, Cabot was caught between fear for his brethren and pride in their response. Listening to Mira hound the two idiots to the south, and young Max trimming the branches around his targets with impressively careful shots, he was struck first by their unity of purpose; everyone would now be called on—men, women, children, all—to defend the camp and themselves, against the most reprehensible of enemies. There was no way to predict how it would go, except that, to Cabot, these people were already heroes and would surely only bring credit to themselves, even unto the end.
From his position alongside Charlie in cabin two, just to the east of the main cabin, which was his home, Cabot moved swiftly to speak with the other defenders. In cabin three, Cody and his family seemed well dug-in, with prepared firing positions and spare ammunition readily to hand. Henry was alone in cabin four but felt sure he could hold off whatever was coming, and in five, Mira was ready to stymie the Nazi assault all by herself. “He moves forward again, I’m gonna put him down,” she told Cabot, who nodded in approval and returned so he could stand with Charlie.
Moments before he’d have reached cabin two, there was a terrifying, alien sound that had no business in a Maine woodland. It was brief but profoundly obscene, a mechanical manifesto loud enough to shred an eardrum. For a second, Cabot thought a low-flying aircraft had somehow found them, and for another, that the truck’s engine had gone spontaneously haywire. But as rounds began to thunk and smash into the wood of the cabins, Cabot realized the sound was coming from a weapon.
Cobb recognized it immediately. “Heavy weapon to the east! MG forty-two! Take cover!”
The disbelief took another moment to evaporate, and then Cabot dashed for Cody’s firing position, upstairs in cabin three; it was the best place to view the battleground to the east, and he could just reach it without exposing himself to the MG fire.
“The fuck is that thing?” Cody demanded as Cabot scuttled into the room and readied his own AR-15.
“That’s what the Rangers faced at Omaha Beach on D-Day, son. An MG42, apparently in full working order. Museum piece or replica, ‘that thing’ is a bonafide killer.” Another stream of fire began, flashing over the cabin but then peppering the roof tiles and back door. “Not even sure he can see what he’s shooting at,” said Cabot. “Didn’t bother getting tracer rounds. But we gotta take that out.”
“They’d only use it if they were trying to cover an advance,” Cody decided. “Watch out.”
The signs of movement began immediately. Two men were dashing in, staying low, and then going prone about forty yards from the cabin. A third came in separately, loaded down with ammunition bandoliers—the MG42 gunner’s assistant, Cody assumed—and then a minute later, the gunner himself arrived. He was taller than the others but still struggled with the heavy weapon and its red-hot barrel, which had to be periodically cooled. Just as he made to set up his 80-year old machine gun anew, peering around the trunk of a large tree, Cody sent a dozen accurate rounds to his location.
There was shouting and a cry of pain, but C
ody’s attention shifted with more noise to the south. Mira was having a tougher time with her would-be assailants, taking fire, which ricocheted off the window frames and smashed the glass all around her. She shifted windows and returned fire in neat three-round bursts, shouting advice to Henry as he searched for the approaching pair. Finally able to see as the neo-Nazis closed the angle, Henry loosed two rounds from his hunting rifle and saw one of the men topple backward as though flattened by a stampede. “Scratch one, cabin four!” Henry called, using their agreed system.
Max and Cobb were also coming under pressure. Distracted by the awful, bone-chilling noise of the MG, Max lost sight of the two northern attackers as they moved off and split up. Cobb stayed in cover, using hand signals in case the enemy was close enough to hear: Scope things out to your right, and if it’s clear, head that way to intercept them. I’ll stay here and cover you. Go quiet and slow.
The support of the MG hadn’t so far yielded the fast-paced assault Cabot and Cody had feared. Instead, the Nazis seemed uncertain, and perhaps unable to see each other; that implied a lack of night-vision gear, and Cody wondered what else they’d forgotten or left to chance.
Then, rounds began arriving through the windows, punching through and embedding in the furniture all around them. Mary hit the floor and ended up under the coffee table, brandishing a sidearm while trying to cover her ears. Cody crouched low under the window, waiting without the patience to find a moment of quiet to see where the enemy was. The fire was consistent, pinning them down and smashing up most of the objects in the cabin; over a hundred single shots raked the place, messily splintering a wine bottle, a mirror, and the old, worn-out plates and bowls in the kitchen.
Seconds after the rifle fire stopped, the MG lit up again, spraying down the cabin and its neighbors with abandon. They sheltered as much from the gunfire as from the noise; it was an evocation of mechanized death, gut-curdling and unforgettable. Each round that hit the cabin’s wooden beams and posts created a deep thunk immediately followed by splintering sounds and flying debris; it was as though the gunner were chipping away at the cabins, one fragment at a time, like a demented woodcarver who possessed only one kind of tool.
Protecting Our Home Page 22
