A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  Rather than beat our heads against a brick wall and allow ourselves to be distracted into frontal assaults against a heavily armed and numerically superior enemy, the NVA kept our eyes on the prize, stuck to our basic strategy, and concentrated on mostly avoiding the auxiliaries while we kept up the pressure on the soft targets that were our real order of business, the lawyers and false preachers and tax collectors and media people who kept up the façade of American hegemony. Slowly but surely we scraped away the guts of United States authority. I honestly believe I can say that despite the presence of several thousand heavily armed gun thugs among us, we did effectively put an end to Federal rule in Lewis County, because outside the concertina wire and Bremer walls of the encampments, by year four it was our law than ran among the people and not Uncle Slime’s. Not a penny in taxes was being paid to the government in Washington D.C. from our part of the Homeland. Not a single red, white and blue flag remained to be seen anywhere on the streets of Dundee or Centralia or Chehalis or Napavine or Tenino, although with Fattie Humvees rumbling through the streets it was still too dangerous for those who sympathized with the NVA to run up Tricolors. We still did flag actions by night, though, and those residents of Lewis County who wanted to see the banner of their new Republic usually didn’t have to look far on most mornings when they got up. No United States or Washington state court sat in session anywhere in Lewis County and the few remaining attorneys were keeping a very low profile. The local police who remained had quietly removed the Amurrican flags from their uniform shoulders; sometimes you could look at a cop’s shirt and see the empty square where the flag patch had been. There was not a black, brown, or yellow face to be seen other than those we knew to be behind the murderous FATPO face shields. Red Morehouse had set up a Party-run Community Council which served as an underground court and local government, dealing with everything from traffic offenses to economic and employment issues to keeping the sewers working and the streets in repair, and the directives of that council were more often than not being obeyed over the orders of the American authorities barricaded behind Bremer walls in the town halls. The FATPOS stormed through Centralia and Dundee and blundered around in the countryside by day, but by then we had set up what amounted to a community early warning and reaction system to get people out of their way and lure them into NVA ambushes. The night belonged to our guerrillas.

  We had reached a kind of equipoise. It became obvious that while we weren’t strong enough to drive ZOG out by pure force, neither was ZOG strong enough to destroy the NVA by force. I remember hearing Red sigh once, “Jesus! This could go on for years, decades, like it did in Northern Ireland! I really wish whoever is in charge of accounting out there in D.C. would wake up and notice all the red ink and get to talking some surrender sense into that bird-brained bimbo in the White House.” But for Rooney and I, there was an increasingly confident feeling that we were winning, and we began to look forward cautiously to some kind of future together after it was all over.

  Then it all came crashing down.

  * * *

  One day in early spring seven of us were in a safe house in Napavine. South Sound Brigade had lately acquired a number of laptop computers with wireless internet connections, and we had a series of techniques by which we could use these to communicate between our crews with a reasonable degree of security. Nothing as straightforward as e-mail or chat rooms; the Feds had been monitoring those for subversive content since September 11th, 2001 and had never even bothered to conceal the fact. We had covert e-mail addresses and codes for when we absolutely had to talk to each other that way, of course, but it was still pretty risky. It was simpler to set up a connection through various proxy servers and firewalls and whatnot that our computer people had created, and then converse in code on public bulletin boards and things like Usenet groups. The main use of the internet in those days was to transmit and receive pornography. It was estimated that at least ninety percent of all net traffic in those days involved sex in some way. There were over 200,000 porno Usenet groups alone, and we utilized several of them as our own private NVA bulletin boards because they were the most secure. The sheer volume of traffic from a world of perverts made it far more difficult for ZOG’s packet-sniffing software and other spyware to intercept, break down, and analyze for suspicious patterns. I won’t get into what our codes were because not only are they totally beyond the bounds of any acceptable utterance today, but they refer to perversions that the majority of people in the Republic don’t even know exist, which is how it should be, and there’s no need to remind anyone. But they were sufficiently complex so that we could carry out an almost normal discussion on any topic right under ZOG’s nose.

  That day we got a request for a support run from Company D, Bob Corrigan in Olympia, relayed to us through Tank Thompson. The Delta boys had hit an apartment on Ruddell Road in Lacey the night before, where a couple of FBI counter-terrorism intelligence officers had been developing a woman as an informer, a drug addict who was willing enough to rat on her fellow dopers, but the Feebs were trying to get her close to Corrigan’s crew through her brother, whom they knew to be a Volunteer. She had drawn the line at betraying her own family and flipped, got in touch with the brother, betrayed her handlers, and set them up for the chop. In the process of taking care of the problem, one of Corrigan’s Volunteers had been shot, and our own medic Bones had been sent up to take care of him. The wounded Volunteer was okay thanks to Bones’ skill, and was on his way to one of our unofficial field hospitals just across the border into British Columbia, but Brigade wanted Bones to stick around in Olympia for a while because of anticipated actions there and in Tacoma and the near certainty he would be needed. Corrigan’s crew was now dangerously low on medical supplies, and Bones needed to carry a full kit for his next casualty or casualties. He needed gauze bandages, paper tape, syringes, morphine, surgical thread, alcohol, sterile surgical gloves, antibiotics, surgical antiseptic, and some more units of plasma and whole blood of all types. Tank wanted us to take him up a load of supplies from one of our caches and also do a taxi. He assigned Rooney and me, Tom Burnham, Mack the Knife, and a foreign volunteer of the kind we were getting more and more from overseas, a Scots kid newly arrived from Glasgow called Ronnie, who had showed himself to be a cool and reliable hand thus far.

  I was considered the senior man, although to be frank I never figured I rated it and I never would take any official rank. I always worked out the logistics of all our tickles with Carter or Red or Tank, who were both smarter than I was, and with Rooney as well who was damned sure smarter than I was. This one didn’t seem to call for any special planning, though. It was all straightforward. We were to take our usual two vehicles, in this case a Volvo and a Range Rover, pick up the medical stuff from the stash, and then we were to go into Chehalis and pick up a sixth Volunteer named Rock whom we were to transport to Olympia and drop off where he told us, before proceeding to make contact with Corrigan, deliver our supplies, and then ease our bodies on back to Napavine. There was nothing unusual about that. Taxi jobs were almost as common as supply runs; I can’t count the times that I picked up somebody on a street corner somewhere and drove them to another street corner ten miles or four hundred miles away, never got or gave a name, and never saw them again. On this run I would be carrying an Uzi with a magazine pouch, and of course Henry the Fifth, my prized Webley revolver. Rooney had her Beretta in that sexy shoulder holster, Tom had a sawed-off shotgun, while Ronnie had a MAC-10 submachine gun and Mack the Knife had a fine old broom, plus we had a grenade or two all around. We were lightly armed because we were not going out to seek trouble, and if we ran into any on runs like these we always escaped and evaded out of it if we could, rather than engage. We usually could. The Northwest is a big place, like I said, especially in the dark.

  When he gave us the assignment Tank told us there would be a Fattie roadblock out in Chehalis that night, and he told us where it would be so we could avoid it, which we did. We left at sundown
, Tom and me and Rooney in the Volvo, Mack and Ronnie in the Rover. We made it to the stash, the farmhouse of a friend of Smackwater Jack we called Arthur, who had all kinds of stuff in his attic and his basement. We got what we needed and loaded our vehicles with the supplies, and since we were a bit ahead of schedule I batted the breeze with Arthur a bit while his wife filled our thermoses with good strong Northwest coffee and loaded us up with sandwiches. Then we headed into Chehalis, sliding in via a series of back streets, our windows open in the cool but not cold night so we could hear as well as see. Tom was driving and Rooney and I were in the back seat, her on the left behind

  Tom and me on the right. A light rain started misting down as we slid onto Kresky Avenue and then turned left into a small strip mall where we were to collect Rock outside a twenty-four hour pharmacy, one of the few that hadn’t been wiped out of business by the big chains. I had met Rock a couple of times before, since whatever he did for the NVA required periodic visits to Lewis County. I knew him by sight, a guy about my age, a little heavier, auburn hair, fuzzy attempt at a beard. He was supposed to meet us out front of the drug store, wearing a red baseball cap on his head, it didn’t matter what kind, so long as it was on backwards in the heighth of hip-hop fashion. We took our first swing by, Mac and Ronnie ahead of us in the SUV, and sure enough, there was Rock, standing in front of the well-lit pharmacy, hands in the pockets of his jeans and looking like your everyday Beavis or Butthead, red baseball cap on his head.

  On his head firmly straight and even, the bill forward.

  “Look at the hat,” said Rooney calmly.

  “I see it,” I said. “Tom, he’s in trouble but he’s alive and we have to try and extract him. Pull over, let us out, and we’ll get him to the corner there where you can pick us up.”

  “Too late,” said Burnham. A black unmarked car slid out of the parked vehicles in front of the Rover. Mack the Knife floored his accelerator and smashed into it. Masked and body-armored figures appeared out of nowhere, and gun muzzle flashes lit the darkness. Ronnie the Scottie leaned out the passenger side of the Rover and cut loose at them with the MAC-10 submachine gun. I looked over in time to see Rock crumple to the sidewalk as a FATPO stepped from the shadows and shot him through the head with an M-16. “Hit it!” I yelled to Tom, and the Volvo roared out of the parking lot, Rooney and I scattering a couple of grenades hither, thither and yon out the windows as a parting gift. I saw the lights of the Rover disappearing around one of the buildings, so at least they made it out of the ambush. As per usual, Fattie was a day late and a dollar short. We were now roaring back into Chehalis down Gold Street. I looked up and saw lights. “Tom, we got a chopper up above.” Burnham didn’t even reply; he simply cut his lights and made the first right he could. For the next ten minutes we twisted and turned through the residential areas of Chehalis with no lights. Fortunately for us, it had been years since the city had been able to afford to turn on the street lights anywhere off the main drags, and so it was dark except for what light came from the houses of the locals.

  Tom took a left turn too wide and smashed into a parked car beside somebody’s house. The door opened and a man came out waving a baseball bat, yelling, “Hey, you! What the fuck? Look at my car! Now, I don’t even believe you think you’re going to drive away, motherfucker!” He lumbered towards us waving the bat. As Tom backed up the Volvo I stepped out of the car, leveled the Uzi at a high angle with one hand and peppered the guy’s roof with a short burst. “Northwest Volunteer Army!” I roared. He stopped like he’d run into a wall and in the glow of his porch light I saw the guy’s face go slack with terror.

  His wife was standing in the doorway. “No!” she shrieked dismally. “Don’t! In God’s name, please don’t! We’re not Americans! We’re one of you! We hate America! Please, please, for the love of God, mister, don’t do it!”

  I laughed genially, “Ma’am, next time you want to pretend to be one of us, the proper form of address is comrade, not mister,” I called out. I reached in my pocket and pulled out a handful of bills, I guess maybe four or five hundred bucks. I leaned over and stuck it in the guy’s shirt pocket as he let the bat fall nervelessly from his hand. “That’s for your car. Some Fatties are behind us. If they ask you any questions, you tell them it was just a Rasta man who be smoking de herb, mon!” Yes, I know, that was complete gibberish, but the adrenalin was pumping pretty hot and you don’t make much sense at such moments. I never did, anyway.

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” babbled the guy, and then I was back in the Volvo and we were off, all three of us laughing like demented loons at my stupid joke. Terror and adrenalin makes you laugh a lot, sometimes. Some of our getaways from tickles were downright hilarious.

  “Rasta man! Rasta man!” yelled Rooney, leaning over and giving me a kiss and a hug.

  Tom pulled out onto Main Street. Off ahead off to the left, up a small side street, I saw a Chehalis police cruiser pulled into a convenience store parking lot at an angle. The light was very poor but we could be seen coming as we passed under the streetlights, and I saw two shadowy figures running out of the store and crouching behind the unit. They must have gotten a call on us and had decided that for tonight anyway live and let live didn’t apply. I saw the shadows draw their guns and hunker down behind the squad car as if to fire. Tom hit an intersection, the light was red, and he at least had to slow down to make sure he didn’t slam into anyone going through it. I opened the right rear door slightly, stood out and up, bracing myself with my left hand inside and balancing the Uzi against the Volvo’s roof with my right hand, and I fired several short bursts at the two cops as we drove past. The distance was maybe seventy yards and a little uphill, but I’d gotten pretty good at shooting while in motion. I saw the sparks of my round strikes on their car and I heard the little cracks and saw the little muzzle flashes as they popped their Glocks at us, maybe eight or ten rounds, a couple of which ricocheted behind me. I jumped back down into the seat, slammed the door, and Tom roared on past them and hung another right.

  I looked over to my left to say something to Rooney, and in the glow from a passing street light I could see a bullet’s spider-hole in the left rear window where the round had hit. Rooney was sitting there with her hands at her side and her head resting on the back of the seat, her face turned towards me, and she was grinning at me, grinning like a maniac, her lips pulled back from her teeth in a rictus, her eyes flat and still. She wasn’t moving, and I knew at once without any doubt that she was dead. The front of her jacket and blouse was dark and bubbling with blood; the bullet had actually hit her just under her left jaw and snapped her neck and severed her carotid artery. There was blood all over the inside of the car and blood on my own clothes. She must have died instantly, without even so much as a second to even think a last goodbye to me.

  I don’t remember much after that. I didn’t go to pieces, apparently, which was good. Tom told me once, much later, that I talked to her dead body all the way out to his E & E post, which was a disused beach cottage at North Cove. He didn’t get into any specifics about what I said, and I never asked. I do remember sitting on the porch of the cottage and watching the sun come up in the east behind me, and remembering how Rooney and I had done the same thing on the morning after our prom night, when she had worn my corsage on her denim jacket and we had spent the night leafleting and spray-painting for the Party.

  There are some kinds of suffering that are impossible for the human tongue to convey. I won’t even try. I’ll speak later of how I was tortured in prison by the FBI, and it’s a pretty gross story, but I will tell you this. I would rather go through another dozen sessions in Bruce Goldberg’s electric chair than to have to relive that one morning when I sat there and watched the Pacific turn from dark to wine-colored to blue-green, and the sand turn white, and heard the birds sing, seeing in my memory that denim jacket and that corsage and her hair in the dawn breeze. Hearing her voice from that other dawn, years before, in my mind, saying, “It will be even more be
autiful when we ‘re free.” Knowing that this was the first morning of all my mornings to come, that I would spend without her. Whatever punishment I ever had coming to me for all the truly bad things I did during that war, God laid it on me then, and as far as I am concerned my debt is paid in full. God played an unspeakable practical joke on me. He gave us all the Republic and the freedom for our race that Rooney and I fought for, but he denied me Rooney for all these seventy-odd years. Me and God have a bone to pick. I’m going to kick it fairly soon, and then me and God are going to have a quiet word of prayer, and He ain’t gonna like what He hears.

  Tom made the necessary calls, and by noon as many of the family and the crew as he could get hold of had arrived at the beach house, Carter and China and John Bell, and Red Morehouse, as well as George Douglas and a couple of others who had sat with her in the Chowder Society back in the old barn classroom days. Ma was down in Portland and John Hunt out in the field somewhere with his Column, which was good in one way because of them all, I don’t think I could have faced Ma. Carter came up to me on the porch. I looked at him. I still hadn’t been able to cry for Rooney. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever did. That was never a time or place for tears. “I killed her,” I told her father simply, looking at him calm and clear and most likely quite insane. “You gave her to me, and I threw her away.” It was a stupid statement on the face of it, since it had been a straight shooting situation and Rooney had just been unlucky enough to catch one, but you should understand that I was conscious of no untruth when I said it. I believed that I had killed her. She had been where she was and she’d been doing what she’d been doing because of me. In that sense I was responsible and the guilt was just as terrible as if my wife had died because of some specific act of negligence or betrayal of mine. That feeling is still there, way in the back somewhere, even after all these years. I suppose you never really get rid of it.