“Are you sure, C.?” asked Tank cautiously. “I mean it. The gear is expendable. You guys aren’t. Splattering some egg on these assholes’ faces is important, but you getting out of there in one piece is more important.”
“We’ve got it covered, boss,” I heard China say. “We have a good quick E & E route still open, and we’re willing to chance it. This is the first we’ve seen of these bastards and I don’t like them already. I wanna see ‘em sizzle.” I didn’t know where China and her team were, but as it turned out they were situated similar to us, in an upstairs apartment in the St. Helens Hotel on Main Street in Chehalis, about half a block from the city hall and with all kinds of Fatties now milling around in the street below. In point of fact, she and Sleepy Sam and The Bear and a couple of our technoid kids were in E Company’s bomb factory.
As an interesting aside on how ZOG propaganda worked, after the day’s excitement the networks and Fox News and whatnot ranted and raved and screamed that we had set up our explosives workshop in an apartment hotel full of low-income, white senior citizens, and this showed how little regard we allegedly had for the welfare of our own people. Well, that was partly true. The St. Helens had indeed been apartments for the elderly at one stage, but about a year before all this happened the building had been bought by a consortium of investors from Israel who were looking for ways to get their money out of the rapidly deteriorating Middle East bandit state, and who had decided that the picturesque old St. Helens would make ideal condos for wealthy refugees from Tel Aviv once the old goyim were removed and the place renovated. The Jews had finally managed to evict the last of the old people only a few weeks before. One of the old guys managed to pass on the keys to his flat to an NVA contact before the deputies dragged him away to the fogey farm, and we had slipped in and sheltered there for a few days while Sleepy Sam and the kids did the old double, double, toil and trouble trick using the bathtub as a cauldron.
“Do it and move it,” said Thompson.
“Give us a couple of minutes and keep watching Channel 7 for the fireworks,” responded China. “Charlie Team out.”
“Everybody out and make sure you deep-six these phones before they can be tracked,” said Thompson. “Everybody to your team lead’s E & E point, and I’ll set up a table in the next couple of days. Sunray out.”
“Well I’ll be damned!” said Rooney softly, watching the TV. She pointed to the scene in front of Chehalis city hall. The local station was running what appeared to be a live, nationwide hookup via one of the networks. A muscular black man wearing sunglasses, a visored camo cap labeled FATPO and the insignia of a colonel was standing in front of the city hall, striking a pose for the media and shouting the odds. He looked lean and mean and super-dudely with his holstered 9-mil and bulging biceps. Behind him on one side, looking fierce and très paramilitary chic, was a well-stacked, light-skinned, black-haired woman, most likely Hispanic, leaning an M-16 on her hip, with a couple of grenades hanging on what I swear was a deliberately low-cut flak jacket, if you can believe such a thing, that actually managed to accentuate a luscious rack and show a little cleavage. She was wearing a black beret and sunglasses as well. Definitely, this was a posed diversity cheesecake shot set up with the media’s connivance. Join the Fatties and meet the bad babes in the berets. On the other side and to the rear of the babbling monkoid was a gigantic, hulking figure we all knew and loathed, dressed in the heighth of Fattie fashion. No sunglasses concealed his lifeless, piggy eyes, but a fatigue cap mercifully covered the point on his pear-shaped head. “That’s Leon Sorels!” said Rooney, pointing. “Wearing a lieutenant’s bars, yet! Dummy-Dummy is moving up in the world!”
“Journeys end in lovers meeting,” I chuckled grimly. “China said to keep on watching Channel Seven, so they must be somewhere near there.”
“Christ, I hope she doesn’t get herself killed,” sighed Rooney.
“Uh, Shane, didn’t you say the CO said we should hit the bounce?” asked Barney diplomatically.
“Yeah, he did,” I replied. “You guys take the Nissan and beat feat. We can be in Chehalis in five minutes, and so Rooney and I are going to hang here for a while, and if it breaks bad and it looks like they need help we’ll try and bop our way in with the Jimmy and extract Chine and her team. I know that’s non-reg, guys, but this is a family thing.”
“Then we all go,” said Johnny Pill, who was also there with Mary. “We’re all family, Shane.” I didn’t even bother to say thanks, since I had known what their answer would be.
On the television screen the bottom floor frontage of the St. Helens Hotel could be seen quite clearly in the background, with a big open truck of seated FATPO gunmen pulled up on the street beside the side entrance, one of them pointing the mounted machine gun menacingly off at some unseen target off camera. The black FATPO colonel was laying the moo on thick. “The people of America have had enough!” he shouted, waving his fist in the air as he raved like a pro wrestler before a bout. That must have been where they got their choreography for this gig. “The President of the United States and the Attorney General have had enough. I have had enough, and Sergeant Lola and Lieutenant Leon here done had enough, and that means this racist, fascist white supremacy bullshit is gonna come to a fucking screeching halt, and I mean now, motherfuckers! Racist terrorism in Lewis County, Washington, is now over, baby! You hear me, you white racist sons of bitches! Dis homeboy gonna cut yo’ gizzud out and eat it! Oh, yeah!” I swear to God the chimp was doing everything except beating his chest. It looks utterly silly today, but in those days people thought that kind of thing was impressive. It was all about entertainment, and this was entertainment. The monkoid was practically screaming now. “You pale-ass Northwest lame cracker pieces of shit are done! “
That was when the truckload of Fatties in the background exploded into a fireball, leaped into the air, and the force of the blast knocked everybody to the ground including the TV camera crew. What Sleepy had done was whipped up a quick batch of nitroglycerin in a crock pot, which he then decanted into a plastic one-gallon milk jug, which he then corked with a stick of dynamite with a cut down fuse. China had then calmly lit the fuse, waited for it to burn down cool as a cucumber, leaned out a window and let the jug fall right onto the transport truck below. Then she and her team E & E’d out a window and over the roof down through a skylight into a menswear store and out the back, down to the railroad yard and into their vehicles. The camera on the ground kept on rolling at an odd angle, and the viewers heard screams of agony and foul language. They saw bits and pieces of burning debris and charred human flesh and body parts raining down onto the grass and the sidewalk, culminating about four seconds later when a clearly visible, smoking human head landed about three feet from the lens and stared into the homes of however many million viewers were watching. God was our special effects man that day, and that footage was shown all over the world and won the network a Pulitzer, not to mention the highest ratings of the year.
The Valiant
The Valiant
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once.
-Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene 2
Things in our part of the Homeland got nasty. We had embarrassed Uncle Slime, and that was never a good idea. The FATPO reacted immediately to the bombing outside the city hall. That night they conducted a series of raids in the pre-dawn hours all across Lewis County, and their intelligence was unsettlingly good. I suspect we had Sorels to thank for that. Most of the people they hit had in the past been at least peripherally involved with the Party, and a couple of places had served as NVA safe houses. Volunteers Roger Larsen, Gerry Jankowski and Kevin Atwater were caught in a trailer in Dundee and killed in a firefight. Kevin especially was a good kid and a good comrade, a Dundee High School and Chowder Society alumnus like Rooney and China and me. Also that night, the Feds came as close as they ever came to catching Tank Thompson. Tank and his wife Pam, and four of our other comrades were in a motel,
which was usually not recommended because motels were easily surrounded deathtraps. But this one was run by a Party sympathizer named Craig Dennis who had taken it over from the Patels who had run it previously, said Patels having been persuaded to vacate with a few shotgun slugs through their windows and light tap or two on the turban with pick handles of the finest seasoned hickory. Dennis had set up special suites of rooms for our people, with an alarm rigged. Rooney and I always liked to stay there because the beds were nice and soft and yet firm with good clean sheets, and by that I mean that we liked to sleep there as opposed to sleeping sitting up in a car or on some forty-year-old sofa in somebody’s basement. The Fatties walked in and simply shot Dennis dead behind the motel desk, but he managed to hit the alarm button as his dying act. Tank and his crew made it to their vehicles in time and burst through the cordon with guns blazing, killing one Fattie trooper, so Craig’s act of heroism didn’t go unavenged. All told that was a lively day in Lewis County.
FATPO built themselves huge barracks and facilities out by the Centralia steam power plant, and another one just outside Dundee, both surrounded by heavy concrete Bremer walls and razor wire, covered by armored pillboxes with machine gun muzzles pointing menacingly through the slits in the turrets, and a helicopter pad complete with a small fleet of choppers. And the cells and the interrogation rooms, of course, with the tiled floors and drains and hoses for washing away the blood. From these base camps they periodically roared out in their copters, their Bradleys, and their Bremerized Humvees, and they conducted mass sweeps through all the communities in Lewis County. FATPO goons rounded up hundreds of people of all ages and both sexes, some of whom had some association with the Party, most of whom did not. It was enough simply to be denounced as politically suspect to be snatched off the street or out of one’s home at four in the morning, dragged into one of the FATPO barracks, and subjected to brutal interrogation, some of it so ferocious that the prisoners died under the abuse. That was what happened to Leah Wingfield, Adam’s wife, when Goldberg got hold of her.
FATPO set up yet another one of those 1-800-U-SQUEAL informer hotlines that so proliferated in those days, promising full anonymity in exchange for information on us evildoers. Needless to say, that phone line brought out every rat and snitch, every crank and psycho, every petty malicious creep in the county to denounce his neighbors, his co-workers, his boss, former spouses and lovers, anybody at all as Jerry Rebs. At first the Zionist terror struck like a thunderbolt across the county as the roundups sucked in so many people that every aspect of life was disrupted, but we were able to alleviate that situation somewhat by making use of the same hotline. We called in to denounce people we knew to be loyal to the D.C. régime, our illustrious mayor and the pro-American local government and business élite among them. We actually got the idiots to round up the entire Chamber of Commerce. After a few weeks, Fattie figured out that the hotline was virtually useless as an instrument of serious repression against the NVA, and that it was just generating a lot of time-consuming and unproductive work for them, and so they refined it into a system of high cash rewards for informers even on top of the usual Attorney General’s DT bounties, but payable only on genuine results. That was when it really got nasty. Remember what I told you about Amurrica being a completely money-driven society? By then we had pretty much weeded out any NVA people who had character weaknesses of such a nature that they might have led to their becoming informers, or rather I should say that the struggle mostly weeded the weak sisters out for us, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t some eagle-eyed chancers in the communities we moved in who were willing to take a bit of risk to get at some big bucks and then get the hell out before we could figure out who ratted. Nor can I deny that we lost some good people to informers; WPB was still tracking some of those rats down in the United States and Aztlan twenty years later.
After about two months of sweeps had produced only a handful of genuine NVA or Party prisoners and had not resulted in any visible reduction in the number of sniping attacks, bombings, and burnings, FATPO ratcheted up the terror a notch and the home demolitions began. The homes and families of anyone who was known to have ever had any affiliation with the Party or who had ever been in trouble for racism of any kind were destroyed, leveled by bulldozers, a trick the government picked up from Israel. (It didn’t work there, either.) Most of those people were either with us on the bounce, already in Federal custody, or else they’d fled the state, but from then on their relatives and friends were liable to punishment for guilt by association. The Fatties would crash through the door of a white family’s house in the pre-dawn hours, drag the inhabitants away or else just kick them out onto the street in their pajamas or underwear or whatever they slept in, and then when the sun came up and the whole neighborhood could watch they’d rev up the bulldozers and flatten somebody’s home into the ground, running over the site again and again with the bulldozers to make sure all the family’s possessions were destroyed completely. Then they’d snatch any white children they caught for It Takes A Village to sell. Towards the end of the war, targeted families and whole neighborhoods deemed to be insufficiently co-operative were rounded up, thrown into barred prison buses, and deported to “relocation centers” in the Nevada desert. Thousands of completely uninvolved and innocent Northwest people died in those tents and corrugated iron shacks in the 115-degree heat and the sub-zero nights in winter, of disease and malnutrition, and torture and physical abuse, especially children and the elderly. Gang rape of female and sometimes male detainees by the largely non-white guards was routine and a whole crop of mulatto and mestizo babies came into the world there. After the war, women who bore such babies became the only people in the Republic specifically exempted from indictment and trial under the several race treason laws.
FATPO was of course immune from all normal legality under the terms of the Patriot Act and the Presidential Executive Order that created them, so long as they acted in “good faith,” which meant whatever the hell the government wanted it to mean. They went wherever they wanted to go, arrested whoever they wanted to arrest with no right of habeas corpus and no legal recourse, tortured and murdered whoever they felt like torturing and murdering, stole money or cars or booze or family heirlooms or whatever else they wanted to steal, and raped whoever they wanted to rape. Sometimes Fatties would simply cruise through a white working class neighborhood at night and fire at random through the windows. The few times the local police tried to intervene to stop individual assaults or criminal acts by FATPO they were beaten and humiliated and sometimes murdered. That jive-ass nigger FATPO commander who’d had his sound byte so rudely interrupted by China’s jug solo once staged a raid on the Lewis County jail in Chehalis to rescue by force some of his men who had been locked up for drunk and disorderly. Between them and us, a policeman’s life was definitely not a happy one, and more of them resigned. Not all of them, unfortunately.
The NVA struck back, of course. We fired at every Fattie we saw on the streets, and they learned in very short order not to show their faces outside their fortified compounds except in force. Or I should say not to show their face shields; FATPO’s trademark was the dark, opaque visor on the helmet so that other than a few officers and people like Sorels who were already known, we actually seldom saw a FATPO’s face at all. We laid ambushes for their convoys with
Baghdad bangers and daisy chains of shrapnel bombs, home-made landmines and RPG fire and many’s the Mad Minute. When we were able to acquire some heavier weapons we hit their bases with mortars and rockets. We were able to do a few creative tickles like poisoning the champagne at one of their booze-ups at the Dundee barracks; unfortunately, Sorels didn’t drink and so he wasn’t one of the three who croaked. But the fact was that there were just too many of them and too few of us to force them out completely. Like the Arabs of the Middle East, we couldn’t win in a stand-up, straight-out pitched battle and we knew that to attempt it would be suicide. So we hung on their flanks and nipped at thei
r heels like wolves nipping at elk or buffalo or cattle in a herd, waiting for The Beast to lose enough blood through all those little nips to slow down and then collapse.
FATPO was almost impossible to put a dent in, but they were slow and after they alienated just about everyone in Lewis County they didn’t get all that much in the way of valuable intelligence from informers despite all the rewards. They just lashed out in all directions like the dying throes of some kind of monstrous hydra. After the first few months we had various systems set up to monitor their movements, including in some cases our own global positioning indicators and other tracking advices we were able to plant on their vehicles.
We also had a bit of luck when a young woman whom they hired as a civilian KP and kitchen worker in the Dundee compound’s mess hall stayed to party one night, everybody got rip-roaring drunk, and she ended up pulling the train. I won’t give her name, because although she’s long gone she still has kids and grandkids around town. Through sheer coincidental good luck, Rooney and I found the girl crying and suicidal down on the waterfront the next morning. We took her to Ma and China, and after one of the most intense sessions of persuasion and calling down the spirit I ever witnessed, the Volunteer gals were able to flip her. She went right back to work and pretended she didn’t mind the gang-bang, that it was all just bibulous good fun and it was her patriotic duty to entertain the troops, and she eventually worked her way up to clerical duties in the office and then despatcher. Eventually she was in the position to let the NVA know every time one of those apes farted, every move they made and every informer they were cultivating. And the Fatties never figured this out. They must have known after a while that we had somebody close, but it just never seems to have occurred to those morons that a white girl might object to their little forced multi-cultural encounters. You wonder what was wrong with their minds. The colossal arrogance of the United States had to be seen to be believed.
A DISTANT THUNDER Page 40
