A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  As far as shutting the casinos down, we started with simple stuff. There’s a wonderful little potion called butyric acid, or sometimes butanoic acid. It smells like a combination of rancid butter and vomit, and it soaks into anything porous, wood or carpet or cracks in a linoleum floor. Anti-abortion protesters used to use this stuff against the murder machine clinics. Once it is soaked in, only time will stop the stench; it cannot be eradicated by any known cleansing agent. Rooney and me and sometimes Johnny Pill and The Magic Man, Spider and Suzie Q. and even Ajax would go into the casinos, play the slots a bit, and like tom cats marking their territory with urine we would leave little pools of this stuff all over everywhere. The reek very quickly drove even the most degenerate and determined gamblers from the casinos and would shut the joint down for days. When the NVA decided to graduate to bigger and better things, one of the big things we liked to do was mortar attacks on casinos to shut down the gambling. This was about year three when we had finally begun to get hold of some heavy weapons, and a casino was a great exercise in infiltration, attack and withdrawal. They were all off in the woods on these little postage-stamp sized “Indian reservations” and so we could park, do a night move into a firing position on a hillside overlooking the casino or in the nearby woods, drop a few rounds in the parking lot to give all the gamblers inside time to get their heads down, then drop a couple more rounds on the casino itself and boogie. They were soft targets and it was a good way to break in a new mortar crew or try new technology with mortars and rockets. I have to admit it was fun watching all those degenerate gamblers scramble, although we were told that in some cases the slot and blackjack players were so intent on the play that they literally played on while the casino was shelled.

  And of course, we just plain robbed them. Casino heists were by no means cakewalks. The casinos were guarded by very heavy and well armed private security-type bruiseboys who were downright trigger-happy and always alert. They were protecting big money, and ZOG was always extremely serious about protecting big money. One of the worst shoot-outs I ever was involved in was during a casino robbery, and I killed a poor dumb son of a bitch, an ex-policeman who had been canned from the Seattle force for alcoholism named Stan Brodka. A sense of duty is a funny thing sometimes. Brodka had more guts than sense, and he honest to God thought he was morally obligated risk his life for the Jews who were paying him eight dollars an hour to guard their millions and who no doubt regarded him as bohunk white trash.

  I always felt rotten about that incident, and when the Republic was finally won I set up what was known as “conscience fund” for Brodka’s children. The War of Independence Victims Pension Fund under which these conscience accounts were set up was one of the Republic’s acts of reconciliation. There were a number of those Special Compensation Accounts, as they were actually called, on both sides, including some where former American soldiers and cops kicked in for the families of Party and NVA people they had done harm, to give at least some of our former enemies credit for having some sense of decency. It wasn’t even recorded in the documentation which side you or your family member who had been killed had fought on. But anyone who wanted to, for whatever reason he felt compelled to do so, could make an allotment to stick a little extra every month into a specific War Victims pension, and that’s what I did until Brodka’s children grew up. The son became a Northwest Civil Guard, a cop like his dad, and not a bad detective as it turned out. He was good enough to find me. The conscience funds were supposed to be completely anonymous and the database hackproof, but one day many years ago, I hear a knock on my door and this thirtysomething man is standing on my porch. He introduces himself and shows me his detective shield. “I won’t come in, Mr. Ryan,” he told me. “This is a personal visit, not business. I just want to tell you from my sister and me that it’s over. You don’t have to give us any more of your money.”

  I didn’t even ask how he knew. “How can that be?” I asked. “Money can’t make something like that all right, no matter how much time has passed. I did it only because it was better than doing nothing at all.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Ryan,” Brodka Junior told me, his eyes and voice completely expressionless as he saw standing before him the man who had killed his father. “I didn’t say it was all right. It won’t ever be all right. I just said it was over. It has to be over sometime. With Meg and me, that time has come.” And he turned and walked away.

  Never forget, when all is said and done, the Northwest War of Independence was at its heart a civil war between whites.

  Then about the beginning of the fourth year there was an abrupt change in Party policy on legalized gambling. The Seagull Casino in Olympia and a couple of others were suddenly declared off limits to NVA attacks, while several of the others were bumped up in priority and leveled by mortar and rocket fire or else burned to the ground in fairly heavy NVA tickles, in some cases costing us casualties. What had happened, of course, was that the Party had been approached and certain of the casinos were now paying hefty protection to the Army Council in order to be allowed to continue to operate, while others who didn’t want to get with the program were being eliminated. To the benefit of the remainder, of course. All very gangster-like. Bugsy Siegel would have approved. Were some of us completely comfortable with this? No. I wasn’t comfortable with it. But it was realpolitik in action, as much as I hate to say it. Those gambling millions helped us buy the artillery that shelled Portland and the Third World votes in the United Nations that recognized us as a legitimate national liberation movement, if you can believe that. From that point on, that healthy skim we collected from the Injuns in protection fees almost single-handedly financed the entire Northwest revolution. To our eternal credit, after Longview we resisted temptation and the casinos were shut down for good. The Running Bears who really were Indians were deported to the tender mercies of the Great White Father outside the Republic and the Running Noses who were really Bernie Bernsteins were sent to the bottom of Budd Inlet in concrete shoes to join Brandy Morehouse’s quondam attorney, or whatever Force 101 did with the carcasses during the Cleanup. I never asked.

  The fourth major prop that needed to be knocked out from under ZOG, after the mud-colored hordes and the media and after the Internal Revenue Service, was the legal system. There we were not the gentlest gamester playing for a kingdom at all, nor did even the relatively merciful Tank Thompson suggest otherwise. Some people are cockroaches who need to be stepped on. Lawyers, all lawyers without exception, were beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. Like the IRS agents, they got a single warning to get the hell out, and then they were shot. Like the IRS agents, the only reason they got that one warning was because if we spent our time hunting down lawyers we’d not have had the time to do anything else. Someone once said pigeons were rats with wings; lawyers were rats with briefcases and they bred like rats, feeding on human misery and draining their fellow man dry. Judges got no warning at all. Their black robe was their shroud. Any judge who had ever sentenced a single white man or woman to a single day in a prison full of nigger butt-rapists or Mexican drug addicts was hunted down like a dog and shot or blown to pieces, and it was a wonderful and savage pleasure to do. The only time I ever jammed a gasoline-soaked tire around someone’s neck and burned them alive, it was a female judge. Most people would be haunted for the rest of their lives by her screams as she sizzled. I am not. She died in agony, she deserved every second of it, and I only wish it could have hurt her even more. I don’t know any Volunteer who wouldn’t turn from killing ten niggers or Mexicans for an opportunity to kill one lawyer or one judge.

  At first we also leaned on jurors who were empaneled in NVA-related cases, but ZOG quickly spotted that problem and simply abolished them, which in view of the general level of intelligence in the citizenry back then wasn’t all that bad an idea in any case. You really don’t want Beavis or Butthead or Clueless sitting on your jury, never mind some Third Worlder who didn’t speak English. ZOG invoked the Patri
ot Act and tried to substitute military tribunals and judge-only special “security courts,” which of course gave the NVA all kinds of nifty new targets. There were whole crews who specialized in courts and Judge Advocate General lawyers and military tribunal judges and facilities. ZOG recognized the necessity for some kind of formal criminalization of our activities and they kept tinkering with it throughout the entire war, using all kinds of special criminal courts made up of a hybrid of both military and civilian authority, not only to put a legalistic stamp on their repression but also to employ the hordes of suddenly out of work lawyers. But whatever they tried to get their legal system back on line we smashed; you may recall that the last combat action of the famous Olympic Flying Column was to destroy the special criminal court in Port Orchard. We effectively shut down the judicial branch of government in the Northwest. Right up until the very end we were still hunting down judges, who were lively and dangerous targets—hell, there was that Sammy Rothstein tickle. Not only that, but the War Prevention Bureau spent the next twenty years hunting down and punishing the worst of the judges and the attorneys who fled the Northwest after independence. That was a debt that badly needed paying.

  The prisons themselves were a kind of subsidiary part of our attack against the legal system. During the first couple of years we actually staged a number of prison breaks purely for the purpose of creating general chaos and tying down the enemy’s police and other forces. This is a good example of the kind of brutal logic that actuated our strategic thinking. We knew that by blowing holes in fences, overpowering guards and unlocking gates, we were unleashing on the community a small army of thugs, drug addicts, cholos, gang bangers, and hoodlums, almost all of them non-white, who would proceed to victimize white Northwesters in their wonted manner and thus increase resentment against persons of color. Sometimes we even made ourselves heroes when NVA sniper teams or active service units tracked down and liquidated black or brown criminals whom other NVA crews had released in the first place. As to the white convicts, there was always a legend to the effect that the NVA was staging these jailbreaks in order to recruit criminals. That wasn’t true, in most cases. We did have some of the white convicts ask to join us, but we had a standing rule: a white con was not considered to be one of us unless he had been racially aware and active before he went inside. God knows there were enough of those who were doing ten year sentences andmore for putting up a sticker or saying nigger out loud.

  * * *

  Ah, yes, the old boom versus burn debate! God, we had some bull sessions on that one way into the wee hours of the morning, on guard duty and in the TV room of whatever safe house we were staying in! You might say that the Northwest Volunteer Army was firmly divided into two camps, the boomers and the burners. Me, I was ambidextrous. I liked both techniques equally. We had bombers in the NVA, to be sure, some damned good ones with really intricate skills in whipping up exotic explosives, packing, timing and detonation devices, you name it. I remember one guy named Sleepy Sam who could actually make things out of plastique, nice-looking dishes and statuettes and lamps and stuff. His exploding cigars were a blast, dude, and I do mean a blast. One of them decapitated the United States Attorney General at a White House formal dinner, and plopped the head right down in the middle of Chelsea Clinton’s quiche Lorraine. Some of our bombings were real works of art, like that tickle I described where we took down Samuel Rothstein. But the problem with bombs is that they are a wee bit indiscriminate. They cause collateral damage and make people hate us—understandably so. Even those whites who understood what was happening and why, and who might have supported us otherwise, became rather alienated if we blew up children in baby carriages and killed harmless old Uncle Tom Cobley who was doing his mall walk just at the moment when a bomb went off in the wrong location at the wrong time.

  That kind of thing happened—you can never be entirely sure how a tickle is going to go down—and to this day there are families in the Northwest American Republic who receive a government pension and full college scholarship because seventy-odd years ago some relative who died when their grandparents were sucking on pacifiers got it from an NVA bomb that wasn’t intended for them. That was one of the arguments the burn school put forward, in that arson was mostly directed against property and there was a lot more time for innocents to get out of the way, although accidents happened with torch jobs as well.

  Of course, there were times when nothing else than a Baghdad banger would do. But bombs were hard to make, hard to plant, and required balls the size of grapefruits to deliver in a shopping bag or briefcase past the metal detectors and the sniffer dogs and the chemical sensors. Many’s the time I have strolled into the side entrance of a shopping mall or office building or government facility carrying something that made me sweat like I was in a sauna. In the first year or so of the revolution the NVA planted dozens of small pipe bombs in shopping malls, little more than fireworks, really, but they made a loud bang and caused a lot of screaming and trampling and grim tut-tutting on television about the horrors of domestic terrorism. They also virtually emptied the shopping malls as the sheeple stayed away in droves, cost the mall owners a bundle when they piled on the detection equipment and security personnel (many of whom were NVA undercovers), and the multinational chains who ran everything from the junk food courts to the stupid little boutiques selling ridiculous designer fashions at astronomical prices closed down. That created more white discontent, and further disengaged ZOG economically from the Pacific Northwest. It created more unemployment and got white people really pissed off at the multinationals, which we then remedied by chasing out the non-whites so whites could have real jobs again with improved paychecks when we put a stop to Federal income tax withholding, so the NVA picked up PR and political brownie points on both ends. One of the many reasons we were finally able to force the bastards to the conference table at Longview was because there was little economic opposition from the multinationals, almost all of whom had disengaged economically from the Homeland years before when the trouble started and they began losing money, and so they had nothing to lose and no particular reason to oppose a settlement which might allow them back into the Northwest and give them at least some access once again to the Northwest markets.

  And of course, there is always that soul-satisfying ka-boom that makes all right with the world and lets you know your day hasn’t been a total waste. I think that’s why I always loved hand grenades so much. They were a lot smaller and safer to carry around than some of those home-made concoctions Ajax and Sleepy Sam cooked up in the bathtub or the kitchen sink, and in an enclosed space they were just as loud and effective. But then I was the kind of kid who always enjoyed flushing cherry bombs down toilets.

  On the other hand, firebugging did have its moments and its advocates. Matches or disposable plastic cigarette lighters had many fewer safety issues attached, and they could be carried in the pocket beside a pack of smokes as you breezed through any security checkpoint in the Homeland. Plus arson was amazingly cost-effective. I have always believed that the Northwest Volunteer Army did more damage to ZOG with a can of lighter fluid and a book of paper matches than we ever did with even the most deadly of our bombings. Never mind the cost of a five-alarm fire in terms of manpower and money to put it out. Fires make the most wonderful diversion when you need to get down and dirty across town and you want to make sure all the local blues are tied up. High explosives were used against human targets when it was necessary to destroy people and plant and institutions that were supporting the Zionist occupation and when we needed to make a statement while doing do. But in cases where we were waging economic warfare or enforcing General Order Number Four and removing a public nuisance, we flicked our Bic. And of course, for those who wanted the best of both worlds, there was always the old Molotov cocktail trick using Ma Wingfield’s Home Cooking Oil. I’m not joking. That’s what we called the formula we eventually settled on for our firebombs, because Ma invented it. Her recipe used a little more ga
soline than Carter’s, a little less motor oil, and a soupçon of magnesium shavings. Swear to God, once Ma Wingfield’s Home Cooking Oil got a home cooking, a whole firehouse couldn’t put it out. NVA crews in other communities across the Northwest had noted our success in Lewis County and after a time burnouts of Paki or Korean run convenience stores from Arcata to Missoula were so common they weren’t even reported in the media any more.

  One of our most interesting little arson tricks was to find something nice and flammable in a targeted business, building, or area.

  It would be a pile waste, paper stocks, something that would ignite fairly readily. Then we pulled out a full paper pack of matches and a cigarette, struck one match and lit the cigarette whether we smoked or not, took a couple of puffs to get the tip burning good, and then we opened the flap on the book of matches, placed the cigarette inside along with the edge of the filter flush with the left hand side of the matchbook, closed the flap, and tossed the whole lot down into the flammable material. When the cigarette burned down to the edge of the match tips the whole shebang flared up into a brief but hot burn, and ignited whatever the flammable material was. Brother Combustion took it from there.