A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  Another thing we learned from those small but bloody encounters in the 1990s was that when confronted with determined armed resistance, the Federal government would back off. Not back down, but back off and circle around, and look for some way to come in at us to where they wouldn’t get hurt and would live to collect their pensions. When confronted with direct resistance, rather than immediately apply overwhelming force to overcome a challenge to the authority of the state, the power structure pulled back and started waffling, looking for the line of least resistance, developing scenarios, analyzing options, trying to find an easy way out, trying to put a “spin” on things. The mark of a weakening and increasingly confused Beast, a Beast that was fatally indecisive. The Federal forces of repression could not take casualties. Its hirelings fought for pay, and when the time came to lock and load they would go to almost any lengths to avoid being hurt. They were real good at shedding the blood of people like the Weaver family and the children at Waco, but to the average FBI agent, his own hide was sacrosanct and he wasn’t going to risk getting it perforated with bullets if he could at all help it. One of the problems inherent in employing a mercenary army is that the mercenaries tend to want to survive to enjoy that monthly salary check, that affluent lifestyle, and that comfortable retirement. They are highly reluctant to go the extra mile for their paymasters when that extra mile might get them killed. When we started making things go boom in the Pacific Northwest, all of a sudden ZOG had a lot of problems keeping their goons on the job.

  It’s true that the Feds had all this high tech stuff, but it was amazingly easy to beat with very low-tech tactics, once white people as a race decided that we were going to fight and we were going to put some guts behind it. The main way that we avoided the high-tech crap was to move, move, move and hit, hit, hit! “Hannibal’s first rule of warfare, young Ryan-never fight the enemy on ground of his own choosing,” as Tank Thompson told me once. ZOG was not all-powerful and omnipotent, and the Pacific Northwest was a very bigstretch of territory. The United States government was damned near on its last legs by the time we rebelled and they simply didn’t have the manpower, the money, or the technical expertise to be everywhere at once and bring their full power to bear. You have to bear in mind also that the bulk of the United States military power in those days had been developed with a view towards defeating and occupying Third World nations while the multinational corporations looted their natural resources, i.e. the Middle East. Fighting an insurgency in the Homeland, pardon the pun, was something they never figured into their calculations. There were certain things which, as rough as it got, they never dared to do here in North America, like dropping cluster bombs on downtown Seattle. The fact is that the handwriting was on the wall for American power as far back as Vietnam, when B-52s and napalm and millions of tons of bombs couldn’t defeat a relative handful of little brown men in black pajamas, each with an AK-47 and a few magazines and a handful of rice. Just as Israel, with all its made-in-America military muscle, never found a way to overcome the Palestinian teenager with the bomb strapped to his body, and America itself never found a way to beat the roadside bomb and the guy with the grenade on the back of a motorcycle in downtown Baghdad. The fact is that low tech can indeed defeat high tech, if there are some guts behind it. Always with that proviso. The FBI and American stooges of various kinds were essentially bullies and cowards, and like all bullies and cowards they folded when someone stood up to them. When you have cowards facing men of courage, the brave men will almost always win in the long run no matter how many high-tech toys the other side has, because along with physical courage usually comes the other qualities necessary for victory. Or as Xenophon put it, the army that is stronger in soul wins. The NVA defeated the United States because we were stronger in soul.

  The object of the enemy’s tactics was to somehow prevent us from hitting them, because in the long run they couldn’t take the public embarrassment of being hit. The myth of American invincibility was being shattered. When we killed their people and destroyed their property and no one was caught or punished, then they were losing the critical third leg of the revolutionary tripod, the credible monopoly of armed force. High tech is only as good as the people behind it, and the people behind it were are a bunch of pig-ignorant niggers and

  Mexicans and feminist bitches who only got where they were by virtue of having tits on them. You have to understand that the revolt caught a lot of ZOG almost as much by surprise as it did us. No one ever really believed that us white boys in the Northwest would ever find within ourselves the moral courage and find between our legs the necessary meat actually to stage any kind of armed revolt against the forces of the Zionist Occupation Government. The throne of ZOG was a lot shakier than we realized, and bringing it down required a lot less forceful a push than we imagined. One of the comments I heard most often from veteran NVA revolutionaries as we sit around the fire at night swapping reminiscences was, “You know, we never realized just how easy it would be when the time finally came, how quickly the power structure would fall.”

  * * *

  Now, when I say we were a support unit, that does not mean that we were totally inactive on our own behalf. We had to operate in Lewis County and provide shelter, support, and supplies for several active service units from Tacoma on down to Portland, everything from food and clothing to safe refuges, staging areas for operations carried out in the cities, hidden infirmaries and medical aid for wounded comrades, intelligence-gathering, money, whatever they needed. That meant that we ourselves had to be able to move around the county fairly freely in order to function. The very first thing we had to do was to establish some kind of arrangement with the local police to stay out of it. They were not trained as soldiers or counter-insurgency commandos, they were law enforcement officers who were supposed to deal with criminals, and they had to be made to understand the difference between what we were doing and ordinary crime. Also, a good many cops were at least halfway sympathetic to the Party, and so we not only had to convince them to mind their own business, but to do so in a way that would not completely anger and alienate them and turn them into irreconcilable enemies. “We’re all going to have to live together after the war,” Red Morehouse reminded us. “Let’s try to keep the bad blood to a minimum.” That’s what I liked about the National Socialists among us: they kept their eyes on the ball and were always looking ahead to a victory they knew was inevitable once the white man found his courage again.

  Red and Carter had not been idle during the pre-revolutionary years. They had developed their own sources and they had a list in their minds as to all of the local police and sheriff’s deputies and state patrolmen who were non-white, which of the local cops were at least somewhat receptive, and which ones were hopelessly Amurrican and not approachable under any circumstances. The problem was that the local smokies hadn’t been totally inactive either, and they had a good idea of who most of us were and what we looked like. We had to be able to move throughout the county without interference and without them picking up their radios and yelling for Federal backup. The state troopers were more of a danger to us than the local forces. By Patrol policy their men were from elsewhere than Lewis County and so not locally grounded, they were better trained, the Patrol was more centralized, and they were a lot better paid for what they did. As cops, they weren’t half bad. “Despite what happened at your house to those Feds, we need to establish credibility with the local blues,” Red told Carter. “We have to make it clear to them that we consider them our racial brothers unless they prove otherwise, but that even if they don’t cooperate with us, they are to give us a wide berth and not interfere with our operations. We have to make a few examples, but only those who have actively done harm to our people in the past. The cops have to make that connection between hurting us and getting hurt themselves.”

  “Agreed, for the whites. Every black and Mexican cop has to go, to start with,” said Carter. “Not just for racial reasons, either, but because their pre
sence has a chilling effect on a lot of the white officers, who will be a hell of a lot more inclined to cut us some slack if they don’t face peer pressure in the locker room and if they don’t have potential informers in their own ranks who might rat them out to higher ups for political incorrectness.”

  “Absolutely,” agreed Red. “This is now the Northwest American Republic and non-whites are not allowed to carry arms and intimidate white people. Hell, they’re not even allowed to be here at all under General Order Number Four. We need to make it clear to the white police officers exactly where their loyalties and their personal best interests do not lie.” I overheard Carter and Red Morehouse going over the names of potential examples. I have to admit it’s chilling the first time you hear a death list being discussed. Not too surprisingly, the list of the most pro-American people in Lewis County happened to be quite heavy with men and women who were the most deeply involved with the Christian right and had this bird-brained fundamentalist virus in their heads about Jews being God’s Chosen People. The Wingfields and some of our other comrades were Christian-Christians as opposed to Judœo-Christians, and they always found this one perversion of thought to be particularly offensive. We never lacked comrades to deal with Jew-loving preachers, Volunteers whose own Bibles were far more well-thumbed and highlighted than the ones the preachers waved around in the pulpit.

  They finally settled on two targets. Robert Blaisdell, chief detective with the Lewis County Sheriff’s Department and head of their criminal intelligence and counter-terrorist division, was the guy who kept tabs on all of us evildoers for John Law. Blaisdell was a military retiree, originally from Oklahoma I believe, who had married a local girl and gone into police work after he left Fort Lewis. He was one of these sickeningly sentimental birdbrains of Mom and God and apple pie who had somehow missed fifty years of history, and who still lived an Ozzie Nelson lifestyle in an Ozzie Osbourne world. We got to know the type. Mister and Mrs. 700 Club. Their houses always had that creepy Pat Boone-ish air about them, as if it were still 1958, or what I guess 1958 was supposed to look like. You expected Barbie and Ken to appear with a tray of cookies and Hi-C and ask you with lobotomy grins if you’d been born again. (“Born again, my ass!” snorted Ma Wingfield once. “The real way to ast that question is whether you been washed in the Blood or not. That’s one way you can tell a Christian from a Judœo-Christian!” I loved Ma to death, but I always had to resist the temptation to ask her how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. I was afraid she’d tell me.) God knows how such people kept it up amidst all the drugs and the buggery and the Spanish and the madness, how they pretended to themselves that none of it was happening, but some of them managed it. They seemed caught in a time warp of white bread and beehive hairdos and Up With People. Most likely it was because the religious right seemed to have a kind of unofficial dispensation from the power structure, a grant of immunity from the contamination, because the system found them politically useful. Jump for Jeeee-zus and praise Israel and you get a pass on nigger junkies beating you to death for the twelve dollars in your pocket and Mexicans won’t fuck your blonde daughter, at least in your lifetime. Or maybe I’m just a senile old fool jabbering, and there wasn’t any reason for it at all except that they were dumb-asses. But damn, some of those Holy Joes made my flesh crawl!

  Blaisdell was one of these. A buzz-cut, no-necked oaf with a Bible in one hand, a nightstick in the other, and a little Amurrican flag lapel pin. He looked forward every day to killing a Nat-sy for Christ, becawz the Nat-sies tried to destroy our Bible. Jeeee-zus loves the little children, red and yellow black and white, they are precious in His sight, so knock a Party suspect’s teeth out, hand his children over to It Takes A Village, then lie on the witness stand about it all because Jeeee-zus is an Amurrican and He forgiveth all sins. U-S-A! U-S-A! You get the idea.

  Blaisdell was joined on the spot marked X by another asshole copper from the Dundee PD, a curly-headed blond doofus named Des Farrow with that same Jesus-freaky lobotomy smile, whose handsome head was not quite as thick but just as empty as Leon Sorels’ cranium. Farrow had been Sorels’ enthusiastic flunky when he was with the Dundee PD in all the homeless-beating and racist-framing. Farrow was so full of brotherly love he was willing to crush kidneys and break bones for it. Whatever the Chamber of Commerce commanded, Farrow did. The Amurrican flag on his uniform shoulder was his god. That and his paycheck, of course.

  The third example was to be our old buddy Leon Sorels himself, now of the Washington State Patrol. However, it turned out that Sorels was very conveniently out of the area at the moment, attending some kind of counter-terrorism conference or some such. How ironic. But typical. We hunted Sorels for years, and he always seemed to have some kind of demonic luck looking out for him. The devil does indeed take care of his own. For a time.

  Carter Wingfield and Red Morehouse brought a couple of more experienced (by about six weeks) shooters down from the NVA’s Seattle Brigade to help them with the wet work, a kid named Cody whom I don’t know what happened to, and an older man who called himself Mister Bill and who was the Republic’s first ambassador to Canada twenty-odd years later when Ottawa finally acknowledged the

  Republic’s existence. In December of that year the four men went out every night and hunted down black and brown blue boys. They ambushed one Mexican cop in Centralia with over fifty bullets in his car, killed one black sheriff’s deputy on a remote back road near Mossy Rock, and toasted another black nice and crispy in Chehalis when they tossed a Molotov cocktail into his squad car with him in it. There were about two dozen more non-white police on the list all around the county, but it wasn’t necessary to track them down. By Christmas every black, brown, or yellow police officer in Lewis County had resigned and left the area. They very quickly understood the message as some of their white colleagues never did, and they saw what was coming far more clearly than some of their white colleagues ever did. No one had to teach them to think racially. They did it naturally. Sometimes being primitive is an advantage.

  In Christmas week the two guys from Seattle had to go back for some heavy scuffling you can read about in the history books if you’re interested, and I got to fill in on the two white cops we had selected to convey our firm but polite message to local law enforcement to mind their own damned business where the NVA was concerned. Before we went out, Carter took me aside. “Shane, I swear before God this is the last time I’ll ask you about this, but can you handle what you’ll have to do? We just want you to drive, but you’re going to have to keep your head and you’re going to be part of a murder, the murder of a police officer. ZOG won’t look kindly on that, whatever your role.”

  “ZOG doesn’t look kindly on me already. After that beating I took from Sorels I’ll pull the trigger on his stinky ass myself, or any other cop,” I said.

  “You may have to if Red and I flub it,” said Carter. “Make no mistake, Shane, we can’t miss. These bad boys have got to go down, because if we flub it then we’ll have all of the aggravation with none of the rep. We want to scare these mothers shitless to the point where they back off, not just piss them off. When you go after a tiger, even a senile tiger, you have to kill it, not just wound it.”

  We waited until dark and then we rolled. I drove a nice roomy Lincoln Continental town car that Rooney and China, of all people, had boosted the day before. They had hot-wired it and disabled the teletracker with the global positioning indicator like old hands. Carter and the girls had then re-sprayed the Lincoln and fixed it up with bogus license plates. I was a bit pissed off because the girls had gotten a little taste of active service before me. Carter gave me a Brazilian-made Taurus .357 Magnum while he sat behind me packing the same Tek-9 I’d been issued for my little stint of guard duty on 10/22, only he’d screwed on the ten-inch barrel this time. Red was in the passenger seat beside me with a pump shotgun between his knees.

  Chief Detective Blaisdell was simple. It was all over almost before I realized what was happenin
g. He lived on a quiet back street in one of the more upscale Chehalis neighborhoods and was taking no precautions at all. Even after the attacks directed against his fellow officers of the Hispanic and Affikin-Amurkin persuasion, I guess it simply never occurred to him that anyone would dare to come after an all-Amurrican copozoid in his own home. Otherwise don’t ask me what the hell the idiot was doing standing full framed in a lighted window. Blaisdell’s house stood on a corner. I hung a left in the cold winter blackness, intending to do a circle around the block so the other two could check out the lay of the land, but it wasn’t necessary. We were presented right away with a perfect target. There in a side window of what was evidently his kitchen I saw a large gray-haired man in his fifties, in a short-sleeved pastel shirt with no tie, big weight-lifting muscles like all the cops in those days had to intimidate normal people, although to be fair I think all Blaisdell’s were proper home grown and not steroid. He had too much hair left for it to be steroids. He was standing over the sink doing something. “That works,” said Carter, rolling down his power window. “Nice slow stop, Shane.”

  I stopped the Lincoln easy and smooth. If he heard us pull up outside, Blaisdell didn’t even look up. I guess after 10/22 cops in the Northwest took some time to realize it was a whole new ball game and pick up survival skills, just like us. It was a narrow side yard and he was standing in the lighted window maybe forty feet from us. Carter braced the Tek-9 on the window sill with both hands; with the window down I could see his breath frosting in the air in my rear view mirror. He cut loose with two short bursts on full auto. The rattle of the machine pistol shattered the quiet of the night. I know that’s a cliché, but that’s the best way I can describe it. Carter’s shots were neatly placed with a good tight pattern. I only saw one round hit the window sill and a couple more strike the back of the kitchen wall in the light;