A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  Carter and the boys had several places way out in the hills or right down on secluded beaches up and down the coast where they went to shoot. You’d be amazed how well pounding surf can cover gunshots, especially when the local people and even the local cops are gun fanciers themselves and look the other way. I always figured that a lot of the people who heard those shots in the distance had a good idea of who we were, and wished us well. I can’t count the happy Saturday afternoons I spent during my high school years down below the cliffs on the sand and the rocky shores, popping away at various floating targets with handguns and picking off seagulls with a .22 rifle, or deep in some misty mountain valley in a blind with Adam or John Hunt waiting to bag a deer that we’d then field-butcher and pack ourselves to take home to Ma. Then Carter would make venison sausage meat and carve the carcass up into steaks and cutlets and roasts, and we’d be eating it all through the winter. At those sessions I was taught how to clean, load, handle, and fire everything from a 9-millimeter police-issue Glock automatic pistol to a full-auto M-16 Adam had smuggled back from the army. I was taught how to reload ammunition and gun safety, and I was taught as much of the practical aspects as could be taught under such restricted conditions, fire and maneuver, rifle squad tactics from Adam, etc.

  One of the things we did when we went out shooting was to play Little Willie, which is of course the most popular marksmanship game in the Republic nowadays. There’s all kinds of variations today, everything from military versions in fighter simulators to the corner shooting gallery for kids where they still use the cartoon characters, but basically they all involve shooting at Little Willie when he peeps out from behind the lawyer’s briefcase. Sometimes Little Willie is a yellow dog, sometimes he’s a pig, sometimes he’s a little white nigger. We had one of the better Little Willie sets of any of the Party units in our area. It was a long mechanical railing with armor-plated figures of a judge with his gavel raised on the shooter’s left and a computer monitor on the right. Our Little Willie, the yellow dog version, would not only peep out from behind the lawyer and his briefcase, he would scuttle back and forth to hide either behind the judge or the computer, and the object was to hit him. What this was, of course, was a target selection and fire control training exercise, which later came to be very handy when we were actually shooting at real live yellow dogs who were trying to hide behind things.

  I knew the Wingfields had a fair amount of guns and ammo stashed, most of which I had played with at one time or another, and I never asked where they kept it, until one day in August I went into their barn and saw what must have been four or five hundred weapons and enough ammunition in boxes, crates, and belts to have made a moon crater if it had gone off. There were also cases of dynamite and some OD green ones marked “grenades.” Carter gestured me to a bench. “You see that line there?” he said, pointing to a series of longarms propped up along one wall. There were some M-16s and AR-180s, several Ruger Mini-14s, one old GI M-14, a Steyr, a beautiful mint-condition bolt-action Enfield .303, a sporterized Model 1898 Mauser with a scope, a Remington .243 also with scope, a Fabrique-Nationale 7.62 semi, and a couple of AK-47s and old Chinese SKSes that from the battered condition of their stocks looked like they had been dragged across the Hunan mountains by a whole generation of People’s Liberation Army draftees. On every table were stacked enough handguns to have supplied the Capone mob in Chicago for the entire decade of the 1920s. “I just dug them up. They’re still in cosmolene from storage. We need to get them cleaned and in firing condition. Hop to it.” For the next two days I rodded cosmolene out of barrels, cleaned firing pins and bolt assemblies with steel brushes, and then lightly oiled every piece with military-issue LSA which had most likely fallen off the back of a Humvee. We test-fired the weapons with blanks while Rooney and China revved pickup engines in case anyone was skulking around the neighborhood listening, and when the fumes got too bad for us to take, Carter turned up a bluegrass CD on the boom box and we test-fired to the sound of Bill Monroe wailing Blue Moon of Kentucky.

  At discreet intervals cars and trucks and vans pulled up and people I’d never seen got out. They had a quiet word or two with Carter or Red off in a corner, were given a selection of weapons and some ammo boxes and bags, and left for points unknown. What we were doing was a departure from normal procedure, since the NVA never stockpiled weapons in any quantity, and it let me know we were expecting something big. If you have a big weapons stockpile that means you can lose it all in one fell swoop if someone rats or slips up. The way to make sure that an insurgent force is always properly armed is to issue the rebels their own weapons and make them responsible for their safe keeping and their serviceability. I later learned that the huge arsenal I’d seen at the barn had come from over fifty separate small hidey-holes, and had taken Carter and the boys a week to collect. Carter had been one of the Party’s primary quartermasters and armorers, which he had never mentioned to me. But then I had no need to know. This inventory was a necessary risk. We had to get the guns into the hands of our people and we had to make sure the weapons were operational before we did so.

  More importantly than any physical preparation, though, we were being prepared mentally and spiritually for the beginning of armed struggle. You should understand that from the very beginning, the Party had grasped Lenin’s dictum that a revolution is not a tea party. In fact, we were just about the first white racial nationalists who did understand that since the Reconstruction Klan, unless you want to count the brief and glorious episode of the Order in the 1980s. Before we could know where we were going, we had to know where we had been. Red Morehouse was absolutely great on Movement history. We would meet in our usual haunts in the Wingfields’ barn or living room or in the homes and basements of other Party members, and he ran it all down for us in session after session as he explained to us what was coming, where we had screwed up in the past and why we could not, dare not screw up again. It’s impossible for me adequately to describe or explain the tension and the sense of anticipation at these meetings during that long, hot summer. Well, hot for western Washington, anyway. We all knew something big was on the way, something that would change our lives forever. I’ll give it to you as best I can remember after seventy years.

  “Genuine politics is about one thing,” Red told us time and again. “It is about the acquisition and exercise of power. Everything else is political hobbyism, a luxury which the wealthy landed gentry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who created liberal democracy in this country and in England could afford, but which a race like ours which stands on the verge of extinction cannot. We are about to enter the world of realpolitik, as the Germans call it. Power, all state power without exception, is in the final analysis founded on one basis: armed force. Religion, constitutions, civil laws, propaganda, custom and all the various social institutions for reinforcing acceptable behavior, i.e. submission to authority, all these things have their place in any state’s social structure, but without the ultimate sanction of the bayonet they are meaningless. All state power, without exception, is initially acquired through armed force or through the imminent threat of armed force. All modern states, without exception, were originally broughtinto existence by men who fought for power with weapons in their hands.”

  “Not leaflets?” interjected someone with a chuckle. “Not tapping on a computer keyboard? No Committees of Correspondence?”

  “No, Mike,” said Morehouse with a smile. “No Committee of Correspondence is worth a bucket of warm spit without the Minute Man’s musket. No committee ever started a revolution except insofar as it concerned itself with the details of carrying out armed struggle. Power becomes accessible to revolutionaries when the existing order loses two vital assets upon which the maintenance of any government depends. The first element is the at least passive and tacit consent of the governed, and the second is credible monopoly of armed force. When the revolutionary movement has both the will and the capacity to commit acts of armed insurrection against the s
tate, and does so with impunity, i.e., the perpetrators are not caught or punished, then the state has lost the credible monopoly of force which is the foundation of all political power. There is then an alternative, a real choice, because persons other than those sanctioned by the state are exercising power over the lives and destinies of others.

  “Now don’t get me wrong. Propaganda and persuasion are equally necessary. Hearts and minds is not a meaningless catchphrase. Our tactical objective must be for the Party to displace the ZOG apparatus of rule by force as well as by transferring the consent of the governed to itself through persuasion and propaganda. Both persuasion and coercion are necessary in order to carry out a successful revolution. Neither element alone can succeed without the other. All the propaganda, all the popular support and all the legal activity in the world are useless if the state can always fall back on armed force to maintain itself and physically destroy the opposition when it becomes too uncomfortable. On the other hand, a revolutionary movement without propaganda, without an ideology, with no purpose other than the pure seizure and exercise of power, these are nothing but political gangsters, hoodlums with guns who wave a flag to justify common thuggery. We need to watch that in our own coming struggle, comrades. We don’t want to end up like the Provisional I.R.A. on whom we will be modeling so much of our strategy and tactics, and degenerate into mere Mafia-like racketeers preying on our own people. But there are moral as well as political reasons for us to look forwardto the coming struggle,” he concluded. “Everyone holds us white boys in contempt, and why shouldn’t they? We don’t kill our enemies, so why should anyone fear becoming our enemy? What kind of race or nation doesn’t pick up a weapon to defend their country, their women, their elderly, their children, their very existence on earth? We deserve contempt for the way we have behaved since 1945. It’s time that white men recovered our self-respect and the respect of those who hate us. And it is a long-standing human truth that respect among men is earned by the shedding of blood.”

  We had no idea how or when the balloon would actually go up. It’s odd that for almost three quarters of a century we used that term, “When the balloon goes up.” I think we all envisioned some gigantic apocalyptic event that suddenly changed everything from top to bottom and made all things possible where nothing had been possible before. None of us had any idea how it would happen. A sudden explosion of race war? A total economic collapse with rioting in the streets? Invasion by the Chinese? Some ecological disaster that created zombies who shambled through the streets moaning for brains? Flying saucers landing on the White House lawn? No one knew.

  And then, by God, it happened.

  * * *

  On the morning of October 22nd I was just coming off the night shift at Mighty Mart, and I was weary from twelve hours of humping big cardboard cartons of plastic crap made in Hong Kong off trucks and onto conveyer belts. I pulled out of the parking lot at the Olympia distribution center a little after six, heading south to beat the morning rush hour traffic as the sun rose, and looking forward to my coming four days off. At about the time Gus Singer looked out the window of his house in Coeur d’Alene and saw the body-armored Federal goons of It Takes A Village coming for his children, I was driving down Interstate 5 in the battered old 1999 Toyota Corolla I had bought from Adam Wingfield for a hundred dollars and which we had then rebuilt together. That car looked like crap on the outside but it ran like a top under the hood. It was a beautiful, crystal clear autumn morning, one of the many that give the lie to the popular legend that western

  Washington is always gray and rainy. I remember feeling oddly contented and happy, because the night before, while I humped the Jews’ trucks and hauled their freight around that big huge freezing cave, I had decided that despite rating only three kisses in three years I was going to grab hold of Rooney Wingfield sometime that day, wrestle her to the ground if need be, and ask her to marry me.

  We were both out of school for good and we knew it. White kids like us weren’t going any further, so why not get on with life’s big ticket items? By now I considered myself a naturalized redneck, and in her culture and her family marriage between two eighteen-year-olds was by no means out of the question. In fact, I had heard both Carter and Ma say that people ought to get married young because it kept them out of trouble. I didn’t know if that was a hint aimed in my direction, but my thinking matched. Hell, until the revolution came I had nothing else on my plate except humping in Mighty Mart’s warehouse, and having Rooney to come home to in a trailer of our own on mornings like this sure would lighten that load. I figured she wouldn’t say yes right away, but I was fairly sure where I stood with her. I knew there wasn’t anybody else on the horizon, anyway. If there had been she would have let me know. That was another rare thing about Rooney. You could trust her, and for a white woman of that time and society, that was unheard of. She never played the kind of stupid head games most white girls played. I figured if I faced her head on and asked her point blank what it would take to make her my wife, she’d tell me straight up, and I was willing to do whatever she told me it took. I didn’t fully buy into the Wingfields’ religion, nor have I since, but I went to their Sunday morning prayer meetings whenever I could because I knew they liked it and because I liked being with them. It wouldn’t be a problem on my end, and if they wanted me to get dunked in the river and have my sins washed away or whatever, that was jake with me.

  I turned the car radio on as I drove back to Dundee on that fine cool morning, but either the morning shock jocks hadn’t picked up on the news of the horrible racist doings out of Idaho yet, or else maybe the government was still keeping a lid on. I found a country music station playing oldies and I even remember the song that was playing when I pulled up in the Wingfields’ yard. It was John Conley, The Old School. It’s about a poor boy who goes steady in high school with some rich Barbie Doll cheerleader type like Jill Malloy, but she dumps him after graduation to go to college and marry rich, and he ends up pushing eighteen wheels. “I got married to a sweet young girl...and kept driving for the line. “ The cheerleaders had always ignored me and Rooney couldn’t exactly be called sweet, but I felt it was on target. As I got out of the car, suddenly I was struck with an idea. Truck drivers still made reasonably good money, and there were a lot of husband and wife driving teams. Maybe that was a future for Rooney and me if we both got our CDL licenses. I was sure Carter could find some way to get us a rig and something to load on it. We could take a long haul to Florida for our honeymoon.

  I had my own key to the house. It was seldom locked, yet this morning I had to use it to get in the back door. I yelled as I got into the kitchen but got no answer. It was unusual for no one to be there at this time of the morning, but not unknown. China might have headed out for school early and Rooney might have gone into town on Party or personal business, and Ma still helped out at Wingfield High Performance with the books and taxes and whatnot. One thing I should have noticed at once, and which I would have noticed even a few weeks later after a taste of life on the bounce, was that the dogs were gone as well. Caprice hadn’t come up and stuck her cold wet nose into my hand and Porterfoy wasn’t lying like a furry lump in front of the fireplace in the living room. I rummaged around in the refrigerator and heaped up a huge plate of bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and grits which Ma had left for me like she always did every morning. I slapped the food in the microwave, warmed it up, poured myself a cup of coffee from the pot which was still warm albeit turned off, something else I should have noticed. I sat down at the kitchen table and started eating.

  About the third bite, I looked up at the fridge and I saw the note pinned on the door with a Tricolor magnet. It was written on a page that looked torn from one of China’s notebooks and written in large red letters with a felt-tip pen. Shane, it read, Turn on the TV. It’s already on CNN. Looks like the balloon just went up. Catch up on Coeur d’Alene QUICK and then get your ass OUT OF HERE. We don’t know how fast ZOG will strike back, so don’t spe
nd all morning staring at the tube like a dummy. Call the Cookie Monster as soon as you get to a safe phone, not from the house. Take care.-Rooney

  Cookie Monster was one of Carter’s multiple cell phones we hoped to hell they didn’t know about. I later learned that the Wingfield women and Adam had E & E’d about three minutes before I pulled up in front of the house. Like most Party people at the time, they had an evacuation kit ready. I had a small one that I kept at the house, but they’d taken that one as well. I went into the living room and turned on CNN. I saw a street full of burning houses and a burning police car. There were fleeting glimpses of people running and ducking down behind things and firing; I couldn’t even tell who they were. The camera shifted and I saw a dead man in body armor lying on his stomach, half on and half off the sidewalk, with bright red and orange and gold autumn leaves whirling around him in the wind and black smoke. The back of his jacket said FBI in bright yellow letters. You could see a bloody hole in the back of his Bakelite helmet; the bastard had been running away when what goes around finally came around. The tag line on the TV screen said Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Live in the lower left-hand corner. A Barbie doll talking head in the top right hand of the screen was babbling. I turned up the sound. “Again, Roger, what we have so far is that according to an FBI statement, a team of agents and United States Marshalls acting on behalf of the U.S. Attorney General’s Child Protective Services Division have apparently been lured into some kind of terrorist ambush, and the FBI in Washington D.C. has told us that several Federal agents have been killed and wounded. The Federal law enforcement team was attempting to serve a child protection order issue by a U.S. Circuit Court judge on the family of one Augustus Singer in Coeur d’Alene when they came under heavy gunfire from the surrounding homes in what appears to be a highly disciplined and prepared terrorist attack.”