A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  “Accordingly, there will be a re-organization of the company here. You will be assigned either to one of five combat teams, or else to a support unit. Comrades, please don’t believe that if we put you on a support team we think any the less of you. In fact, it will mean that we think well of your own special skills and strong points. I know that every one of you has the courage of a lion, or you wouldn’t be here today. Support is vitally necessary. The combat teams will be taking this war of independence right to the enemy, but they will urgently need support fighters to pass them the ammunition. Nor is assignment to support chiseled in stone. The fact is that there will be casualties in the combat squads, as there already have been all over the Homeland. Don’t worry, if you still want to pull a trigger in a few months, there will be open slots for you. For the rest of this evening Red and Carter and I will be speaking with all of you about your new assignments.”

  Later on Red took me and Rooney aside. “Look. guys, you’ve really done well with me over the past few months,” he said. “I’d like to keep you on my personal staff and bump you both up to sergeant. I might also add that if you stick with me, you’ll be a lot closer to the center of the action in this little revolution of ours and a lot better placed to move up in your careers after we establish the Republic. You’ll get to meet with a lot of the top people in the Party, and you’ll make contacts that will stand you in good stead for the rest of your lives.” He didn’t mention that while there would be a high degree of danger, on a day to day basis we’d be more or less out of the direct line of fire and thus somewhat safer. I wondered if that thought had crossed his mind. Or Carter’s.

  I had already made up my mind. “Red, you know I’ll go wherever the Party orders me to go and do what I’m ordered to do, but I want to stay here in the place I was born and fight against these bastards who have made my life such hell. I never thought about a career. Never had any reason to with these Jew bastards running the country. All Amurrica could ever find for me top do was mop the floors of burger joints and unload their damned trucks full of cheap foreign plastic junk, and yeah, I want something better than that. But right now we got a war to win. When it’s over, then I’ll think about those things. But Roon, I’ll lay this on the line,” I said, turning to her. “You’re smart as a whip, you deserve to move up, and I think you could do a lot of good working with Red and the Political Bureau. Even though it means we’d be apart a lot, I’d feel a hell of a lot better if you were off behind the scenes somewhere and I didn’t have to worry about you getting down and dirty in the streets.”

  She shook her head. “It don’t work that way, Shane. We’re married. I meant it and you better did too, or I’ll kick your ass. You ain’t shoving me into the background. Whither thou goest, there go I,” she said.

  “That from the Bible, Roon?” I said with a smile.

  “I don’t know. But it’s my answer.” She turned to Red. “I appreciate your concern and Dad’s, Red, but I am Shane’s wife, and if he goes to a combat squad, I go to the same combat squad.” So after some discussion between us and Tank and Red and Carter, we were teamed with Johnny Pill and a new man from Chehalis who used the name Ajax. John’s girl Mary would be our unofficial support attaché and runner. Girl, hell. She was forty-five if she was a day, but a good old gal I always liked.

  Up until now in my ramblings, I’ve mentioned the names of a lot of my old comrades because I’d met them in the Chowder Society or at our backwoods shooting parties or on leaflet litter and spray-paint runs, and I knew who they were prior to 10/22. But from that point on we almost never knew the real names of anybody we worked with, only noms de guerre, and Ajax was a good example. I never did find out what his real name was, and I’m not really sure I wanted to know.

  Ajax was a chubby-looking guy auburn-haired guy with very white skin and horn-rimmed glasses and acne, a little older than me, but he still wasn’t shaving. He had a twinkle in his eye and a merry laugh. He looked like the standard fat nerd comic relief from a teenage gross-out movie, or else your typical computer geek, which is a good way to look if you don’t want some Fed or some red, white and blue asshole to suspect anything right up until the point where you blow his brains out. He joined the NVA after 10/22, personally recruited by Red, which was as good a reference as any Volunteer could give, but by the time we teamed up he had already made his bones several times over, and so we could therefore reasonably assume he wasn’t an informer. This was back in the days when they were still going through the motions of putting any of us that they caught on trial, or some of us, anyway. The ones of us they didn’t murder in prison. It didn’t look good in court for the government’s star witness to have killed people. Later on neither the FBI nor FATPO had any scruples at all about allowing their operatives to commit the odd murder in order to win an NVA rep and work his way in.

  Ajax was a kind you’d meet on occasion in the NVA, a genuine stone killer. I don’t mean a gory tattooed psycho like O.C. Oglevy and that crew from Hayden Lake who routinely perpetrated crude jests with bleeding body parts, but a guy who could shoot two people in the back of the head and then go clean out a breakfast buffet while he talked about the lost world of Atlantis. I don’t know how he got that way, or any of them. Sometimes I think all the computer games kids played back then, where you shot at virtual monsters and people and tried to kill them and blow them up, gave my generation a world class sociopathic streak. Okay, granted, I wasn’t exactly Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm myself, and neither was Rooney. Hell, I learned how to pound Bobby Fernandez’s head to a pulp with a concrete block from watching wrestling on TV. But while somebody like that can be a real asset in a crew like ours, you’re never quite comfortable around them. For all I know, maybe he wasn’t comfortable around me. But I had to do the resurrection shuffle for a while after the Rothstein hit, and I was kind of relieved when I got back to Lewis County and found Ajax had been transferred up to Seattle where there was plenty of work for good shooters who were totally without anything remotely resembling a scruple.

  The re-organization took place in June, eight months after Coeur d’Alene, and it was a sign that the Party was recovering from the glorious disaster of the Sixteen Days and starting to get our act together. For the next few years my comrades and I devoted ourselves to the single-minded objective of detaching Lewis County, Washington, from the United States of America and making the Republic a reality. And we did it.

  Going’ Cross The Mountain

  Going’ Cross The Mountain

  Going ‘cross the mountain, O fare thee well.

  Going ‘cross the mountain, you can hear my banjo tell.

  Got my rations on my back, my powder it is dry.

  Going ‘cross the mountain, Prissy don’t you cry.

  Going’ cross the mountain, to jine the boys in gray,

  When the fighting’s over and done, I’ll come home to stay.

  Going ‘cross the mountain, if I have to crawl.

  Gonna give old Honest Abe a taste of my rifle ball.

  Going ‘cross the mountain, O fare thee well.

  Going ‘cross the mountain, you can hear my banjo tell.

  -Appalachian mountain ballad, 1861

  Right about here, this gets kind of difficult for me, ma’am. Logically I suppose I should give you a day by day and blow by blow account of everything that Rooney and I did as Volunteers in an active service unit. But there’s a couple of problems with that. For one thing, I honest to God can’t remember where I was and what I was doing every single day of the war. It was seventy years ago, and what I mainly recall from that time in my life was a lot of driving around, a lot of crappy food heated in microwave ovens, enough black coffee so I’m sure I must have poisoned myself, sleepless nights of guard duty sitting at windows or out in the woods or in some doorway on a rainy street, long intervals of boredom where we were preparing to go out and do something and then moments of really frantic action when we were out doing something. Both sides spent most of their time try
ing to sneak up on one another and kill by surprise. It could all happen so fast you’d be dead and not even know it. There was a constant low level of fear, of nervous apprehension even when we seemed to be temporarily safe, and it became a kind of constant background of life, something you just accepted like a minor toothache that never went away. Ever try living day in and day out with a toothache? Anyone on either side who says he wasn’t scared is either a psycho or more likely a damned liar. It wore your nerves to fiddle strings. Rooney and I were lucky. We turned towards one another, not against each other. A lot of those field-couples didn’t make it. China and Ted didn’t. They only lasted a few months, although they never had a preacher like Rooney and I, which was apparently her idea rather than his. Carter didn’t approve of that and Ma damned sure didn’t, but China in her own quiet way was the truly stubborn one, and the war had made her an adult at sixteen. Under ZOG, some kids never grew up, their whole lives; life was kind of one long extended adolescence. That’s another thing we ended.

  Rooney and I used to fantasize about a dirty weekend. After the revolution was won, we decided were going to go off to a motel somewhere by the sea. There we would stock up on food and soft drinks for a week, put up the Do Not Disturb sign, and we were going to have our own little orgy where we could actually take off all our clothes and make love without constantly looking at our watches and listening for sounds outside and not have to grab our guns and scope the sitch if Clarice started barking. After we got it on we could both go to sleep together at the same time, neither of us on guard, with no weapons in reach, and then we could get dressed and go for a walk on the beach and go to a restaurant and sit down and have a meal and then go back to the room and get it on some more and not have to worry about death and torture coming through the door. That was our fantasy. We never took it as far as a home and children. We both understood that we did not have that privilege at that point in time, and that to imagine what such a life would be like would cause us only pain, and so we avoided it.

  After all this time it’s just kind of run together in my mind. Yeah, I remember certain tickles better than others, and I’ll try to tell you about them, but I suppose about the best thing I can do is to describe in a general sense what we did and why we did it. At least so far as I understood it from the spear-toting end down on the ground. If you want all the deep strategic thinking you can go to the library and check out a whole stack of war memoirs. I think every member of GHQ who survived the war wrote a book you could crack open a turtle with. Well, I suppose they have the right. We beat the bastards, after all.

  How do you defeat the mightiest empire that the world has ever known, on its home ground, with only a handful of brave men and women and virtually nothing else? Audace, audace, toujours l’audace! Audacity always. That was Danton at the beginning of the French Revolution. Danton lost his nerve, and in the end he lost his head. The NVA never lost our nerve, we kept our heads, and we won.

  We were always audacious, and like the British commando motto, fortune favors the brave. I can’t remember the Latin on that one. Audacity plus a heavy dose of just plain mad dog meanness. We made sure that the enemy was scared of us, that when they went out on patrol or on a stakeout they hoped and prayed they did not meet up with us. Red Morehouse had described our coming strategy often enough in the Chowder Society get-togethers before the balloon went up in Coeur d’Alene: “Remember, boys and girls, what we’re doing is fighting a colonial war. There are rules and precedents aplenty from the last century in fighting and winning a colonial war, if we can only have the good sense to see them, and thank God we’re finally acquiring that kind of practical sense, even if it’s at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute. We are not trying to destroy a huge tyrannical government and an evil empire completely. That is beyond our capacity to accomplish, largely thanks to the fact that we spent the sixty years after the end of the Second World War screwing around, but we won’t get into that. What we are now attempting to do is to persuade an occupying power to give up a specific piece of geography because that power is old, tired, confused, and eventually giving the territory up will seem like the line of least resistance.”

  “So how do we persuade the United States that giving up the Northwest is the line of least resistance?” I asked in class one day.

  “Generals never surrender in a colonial war, Shane,” he told us for what must have been the fiftieth time. “The accountants do. Given courage and tenacity and a little luck on the part of the insurgents, eventually it simply becomes too expensive for the occupying power to maintain its hold on the colony, too expensive not just in money but in manpower, political capital, and prestige. Right now the United

  States is so embroiled with what appears to be the last-ditch effort to save Israel from destruction that when the balloon finally goes up here in the Northwest, the government in Washington will probably consider the threat to its continental borders to be of less import than saving the Zionists’ bacon. Our strategic goal will be to force an American withdrawal from the Northwest by simply making it too damned inconvenient for them to stay.”

  How do you knock down a wall of tyranny? The first thing you have to do is to figure out what’s holding it up.

  In the case of the United States, the entire social and political structure rested on one foundation only—the almighty dollar. The only thing that even remotely approached any kind of spiritual or moral values in America was the religious right’s weird version of messianic Judœo-Christianity, and they were always a minority since most people could see they had a few screws loose. But beyond that the people of Lewis County simply didn’t have that much motivation to fight for a system that had been screwing them all their lives. Even though they were forbidden by the Dees Act and a hundred other repressive laws from saying what they felt out loud, almost all white people were sickened and enraged by what they saw around them every day and the way ZOG made them live. A large number of the locals were always secretly cheering us on. The majority of the residents wouldn’t help us directly, at least until it became clear that we were going to win. But neither would they oppose us, and neither would they help The Beast. The odds were against us, true, but not as much as you might think. ZOG was always a lot weaker and a lot more vulnerable than anyone ever imagined, and when we really got started under Tank Thompson’s aggressive new leadership, we discovered that we had never fully known our own strength. I always thought it ironic that ZOG always seemed to understand our threat potential so much more than we ourselves did.

  The trick was to bring down the system, not just chip away at it. That meant we had to figure out who and what to target, and that didn’t mean a lot of spectacular Fulton’s Market-style shootouts with cops. Cops and later FATPO were basically annoyances and interruptions of our work that we tried to avoid whenever we could, so we could concentrate on the business of bringing down The Beast. Okay, FATPO was a real annoyance. But Red had been right that night we’d whacked out the cops. Cowardice had nothing to do with it. Our job wasn’t just to slaughter our enemies, but to create our new nation. The fact is that ZOG didn’t care about its soldiers. They were as expendable as toilet paper, and with the massive unemployment all across the empire, the régime could always buy more. The Feds didn’t care how many cops or soldiers or even Fatties and FBI we killed. We had to hit them where they cared. In their wallets.

  To begin with, we focused our attacks not against specific operations of the Zionist government’s control apparatus, but on the classes of people, the institutions, and the infrastructure that kept the power structure afloat. Foremost among these were the masses of non-whites, mostly illegal Third World immigrants, who provided the cheap labor that kept the capitalist system viable and provided a disincentive for change among the wealthy people who actually ran the country. As long as the rich men in the suits were making money off the Third World presence in the Northwest, they were motivated to fight for the status quo. We had to make the Third World immigrants
uneconomical. We hit the businessmen and the corporations that hired them, the wealthy ruling élite who were completely mercenary and who we knew could be persuaded to change sides once it became clear that there was a serious threat to their money. When the accountants finally decided the U.S. needed to pull out of the Northwest, it was the wealthy élite who would deliver the message to the political echelon, so persuading them was a major priority. After the non-whites in importance came the media. Then came lawyers and the legal system, and above all the tyrants in the black robes. The corrupt and venal politicians. The Internal Revenue Service and the tax collection machinery and financial infrastructure. The Judœo-Christian churches and those damned false prophet preachers and televangelists who shrieked and scammed for Israel. That’s where we concentrated our fire. If I had to pick out any one factor that contributed to the victory of the NVA and the birth of the Northwest Republic, I’d say it was single-mindedness on our part. We always kept our eyes on the prize and we didn’t let ourselves get sidetracked into mayhem for the sake of mayhem.