“Did they know how to handle it? I mean—that must happen all the time in a place like that.”
“They tried. My spiritual adviser worked with me. They brought a woman psychiatrist. Then they brought a man psychiatrist. They tried. Then my abbess said I must be sent out into the world again to find out if that was what Jesus meant for me. They sent me out and I got well. I went to prison but I got well.”
“But what you doin’ here, baby?”
“My abbess said to me—Chelito, find the truth. So I looked. I said, if the truth is not in peace perhaps the truth lives in the violence men do. Because violence is so much more the mark of all of us than peace I wondered if Jesus meant us to be violent. I look for the truth.”
“Okay. When you find it, what you gone do with it?”
“I am going to take it back to my abbess and to my cell in Rhode Island and offer it up to Jesus in my daily prayers. She will let me stay there forever when I have found the truth.”
“The abbess?”
“Jesus.”
“Oh. You said she.”
“Jesus is a woman, Sally. Perhaps a black woman.”
Of all the women of any country at the camp at Hei-ma-ho, Chelito was the most accomplished at violence. She could throw a knife with greater accuracy than most people could use a flashlight beam. She could kill with her hands in eleven different ways. She was accomplished with all small arms, all explosives. She feared nothing but loss of the love of Jesus. All she required in order to excel, with total devotion and no questions, was to be led by a purposeful woman. After Teel had gone over her records a few times, she ordered that Chelito be sent to her.
5
January 1976
The Army Intelligence agent who had just come out of China fifty-six hours before had posted a short letter to a name and address in St. Louis, Missouri. It said, as arranged four years before, Dear Jack: Just got back from the Laundry Convention. Will wait for your call at the Hilton, New York, beginning tomorrow. From San Francisco the agent also called someone named T. Garfunkel in New York.
“I’m part of the Hong Kong shipment,” the agent said. “I just got into San Francisco.”
“We want you in New York.”
“Can I take three days here? I got bad jet lag.”
“Take until Monday morning. Call me from New York Monday morning.”
The agent flew into New York on the next available plane and checked into the Hilton Hotel.
They couldn’t wait. When the door opened into a large suite on the twenty-sixth floor, Dr. Baum and the three colonels were waiting there.
When the CIA plant who had spent four years in the Chinese guerrilla training camp had landed in San Francisco from Hong Kong, the agent had followed instructions that the air stewardess had handed over twenty minutes before touchdown. The note said the CIA plant was to sit at a table in the airport’s pancake joint.
There were plenty of empty tables. Almost as soon as the plant sat down, a short, trendily dressed man wearing gray pork chop whiskers, thirtyish with a high, bald head, sat down across the table. “Call me Langley,” he said. “We want you to take these pills.” He handed over a labeled vial of brown glass. The waitress arrived. The trendy man ordered trendy lindenberry pancakes for both of them without looking at the card, while the plant read the vial label. It said: Three Pills At 1 P.M. (Yellow). Two Pills At 4 P.M. (Green). Call at 5 P.M. When There Will Be Abdominal Pains: Dr. Abraham Weiler, 2459 Pacific-Walnut 2–4282.
While they ate the pancakes, the man said that a room had been reserved at the St. Francis Hotel for the pill-taking.
The plant called a New York number from the St. Francis, asking for T. Garfunkel, reporting arrival in San Francisco. The Garfunkel voice told the plant to call again on Monday morning at 8:30.
When the pains began, the plant telephoned Dr. Weiler who said he would be right over. He arrived within twelve minutes, a neatly kept man with a russet moustache that looked dyed. He diagnosed acute appendicitis without any examination and telephoned for a hospital ambulance.
The agent was isolated in a three-room suite at the King de los Reyes Hospital in O’Farrell Street. The de-briefing began at 5:55 P.M. When no call reached T. Garfunkel in New York on Monday morning, Colonel Pikow traced his revolutionary commander through the hotel to the hospital. By saying he was the agent’s brother he got a full report on medical progress. On the fourth day when the debriefing was concluded, the lower abdomen was incised and sewn. On the fifth day the agent flew to New York.
6
January 1976
Admiral Melvin looked down the long table of commanding officers of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, with their aides.
“Everyone here has read the China de-briefing. I don’t know about you but when I finished that report I just felt like resigning and running to Costa Rica.” He smiled grimly. “But that feeling left me. We all know what we’ve got to do—we’ve got to get ready to stop something we never imagined could ever exist. We have staff plans, of course. Every contingency is what staff planning is. But nobody-nobody, nobody—ever foresaw the nature and size of this contingency.
“The fact is—I just don’t know how to break it to the civilians. The White House people and the NSC are bound to think, at first anyway, that this is just a rabble to be broken up before they can get started. Maybe so. But it doesn’t look that way.
“Our agent gives us minuscule details as far as their system has allowed. I mean the agent knows what is going to happen but not where the other leaders are. The agent knows they have a force of 750,000 trained guerrilla troops and you’ve read right there how they were trained, where and by whom. But the agent doesn’t know where any of the leaders are, has no idea who is the leader of all this.
“Well, the agent knows the projected operations. On those operations rest the whole nub of this nation’s survival in the form in which it has existed since 1776. How can we fight a full-scale war inside thirty American cities containing seventy-eight percent of the population of this country, against a hit-and-run, worse-than-terroristic, fully armed, fully trained guerrilla force whose only military objective is to murder the population? Here is the one-quintillion-dollar question: Can we or can we not fight that kind of war?”
7
1971–1976
From the mid-sixties forward Teel had been working on her plans for recruit training, which she put into operation in early 1971. She did it mostly with ready, steady money. She began by having the smack pushers recruit from 53 street gangs in northern Brooklyn; 41 gangs in the south Bronx; in all from 219 youth gangs in the greater metropolitan area, including Newark and Jersey City. They were all adepts at urban guerrilla warfare, having been at it since childhood and having (effectively) kept the police from operating on their turf since the late sixties. She pulled in some recruits from all of them: the Dirty Ones, the Spanish Kings, to the B’nai Zaken and the Open Fly League. Males and females were welcome. She gave them something they had never seen before: real equipment, real weapons, real purpose and real discipline.
Teel had reasoned purely about their training. To turn slum kids into riflemen at lowest to no cost/risk, she took advantage of the zeal of the National Rifle Association. Already many shooting ranges had been set up in cellars and armories in all Teel’s thirty cities to teach housewives how to protect themselves. Teel established others. Some were even self-liquidating because they were part of restaurants which Teel advertised as “Gun Clubs.” She turned a profit on meals and fees and weapons rental, she was assigned National Rifle Association instructors, and before and after the housewives had their training sessions, the boys and girls from the Filthy Fifty or the Mayaguez Monsters took their lessons in the same ranges from the same qualified teachers.
When they knew how to handle weapons, Teel moved them along to the second training area. She paid them (with money or shit) to join the Army and Air National Guard, that reserve force available for wars and civil emergencies
; a full-time partner in the air-defense network; the operating force for 43 percent of the missile sites around the key cities of continental United States. The Air National Guard flew 52 percent of the fighter-interceptor planes on a round-the-clock runway alert.
Enlistees had to be between seventeen and twenty-six. The hitch was for six years on a part-time basis. On enlistment they served from four to six months on active duty, having the choice (Teel’s choice) of training with the Army or Air Force. The remainder of the six years’ service was spent in part-time training with the guard unit in which they had chosen to enlist. A Guardsman received a full day’s pay of his military rank for each day of his Annual Field Training plus any other days on active duty for training at military schools or special assignments. Guardsmen were not subject to Selective Service. Over 73 percent of the personnel Teel had caused to enlist were able to qualify for special guerrilla training by the government. Deserters or malingerers were killed by Teel’s people. But she paid the others well.
In the five years between 1971 and 1976, Teel arranged for the enlistment of a rounded-out average of 4,000 of the very best marksmen from her Gun Club-NRA training to enlist in the National Guard in each of the Thirty Cities, giving her an elite armed force of almost 125,000 street fighters.
When the governors of the states had to call out the National Guard units to fight Teel’s urban guerrillas beginning in July 1976, four thousand of the best-trained Guardsmen in each city would be able to kill a preponderant number of their fellow Guardsmen before they switched over to the urban guerrilla forces with their weapons, after having dismantled Air National Guard planes and all protecting missile sites on city perimeters.
Effectively, Teel’s Guardsmen would reduce the total complement of the National Guard from 500,000 fighting men to (probably) 70,000. But Teel’s true coup, overall, was that the explicit training of 125,000 guerrilla troops had been done at no cost to the Freedom Fighters movement, except a few dozen killings to enforce discipline; it had all been done at taxpayers’ expense. Teel was fond of the name Freedom Fighters. It was the essence of the sublime bullshit that the people liked to pretend they understood or cared about. Teel’s guerrillas would be fighting for free tecana, not for abstract freedom. They had too fucking much abstract freedom as it was. They would be fighting for rich ass in the midtown and suburban areas because rape was a weapon that terrorized the square men if not (in the long run) the women. They’d be fighting for the freedom to burn and kill and loot until they got more than their share of all the gold the squares had taken two hundred years to corner.
Backing up the trained and disciplined guerrillas, the 125,000 Guardsmen, were the real foot soldiers of the Teel intention: the entire population of the narcotics industry with their relatives and families; illegal aliens; all the disaffected and disenfranchised who wanted deadly action for the sake of action, to bring death cheaply either to escape boredom or to get revenge for not having been born privileged. Teel had the working criminal classes: the whores, the hoods, the muggers, the armed robbery people, the thieves—everyone who worked in crime with their hands; she had only a very few who worked in crime with their heads. There were no patriots. Teel didn’t want to have anything to do with patriots, idealists, scene-savers, brotherhood-of-man hustlers or anybody else like that. They found out too quickly that they had too much to lose in this new kind of war where there was only one objective: to destroy everything that stood for the immediate or ultimate benefit of anyone.
When the trained cadres of field commanders came home from China in January 1976, Teel had everything ready for them. She gave them marksmen, tested troops, a rabble disciplined by their need for heroin, large arms caches at multiple sites in the Thirty Cities, medical support, and a nuclear strike force—all of it scientifically dispersed; all lost to the eye deep within every part of the cities. The ten combat commanders moved in with the mercenary foreign guerrilla Army Corps commanders who had been organizing for Teel since 1968. When the Chinese-trained Americans convinced the others (and Pikow and Teel) that they were ready to take over, they were in full command.
Four of the mercenaries stayed on as a seconded General Staff Plans Unit for a shot at the most organized action urban guerrillas would ever see. The first ninety-seven guerrilla strikes would be made, the first eleven nuclear bombs would be detonated, the first two water supply systems would be poisoned, the first twenty-eight hospitals and schools would be burned down beginning at dawn on July 4, 1976, two-hundredth anniversary of the Republic.
8
1971–1976
For four years Bart had lived through the days and had tried to sleep through a thousand despairing nights, his mind full of the crowding images and memories of Enid. He taught himself that she was alive until he knew she was alive. He tried to accomplish everything she had wanted him to do so that, when she returned, she would be proud of him.
He won the election to the Senate with a plurality of 29,812 votes. The national press consensus had him on the end of a rope and was pulling him toward some future White House. The state chairmen, county leaders, ward captains and block stewards had known in advance how much the plurality would be but they were bewildered by the extent of the unprecedented national ground swell, in terms of hard money, which the candidate kept generating. Of course, they revealed this phenomenon to all other professional politicians in the party. The press only knew what the professional politicians told them. When the Maryland people told the California state organization that Simms had pulled in $67,000 in cash from their western state while running for office 2,800 miles east; told the New York pols that their voters had sent him $209,000; Illinois, $174,000; Pennsylvania, $136,000; Massachusetts, $91,412, none of the professionals could explain how it had happened. But they knew that an awful lot of usually indifferent people had put their money where their mouth was.
Simms never said anything much himself. In the Senate, he didn’t do anything much either. Yet, in the first year after his election, his campaign managers, all full-time professionals who did not kid each other, admitted to the national fraternity that the party headquarters in seventeen states had received over $4 million in unsolicited campaign contributions from individual voters urging that he run for the presidency in 1976. The professional politicians were very, very much impressed. All of them cross-checked all of the seventeen states for confirmation. They knew in 1973 that he was a sure winner for 1976, but they were baffled by how to help the press interpret why he had this effect on the voters. They decided it must be something in his looks that they were not yet able to see. They decided he had something somebody had called charisma when they had to find a similar label for the also-mystifyingly popular John F. Kennedy.
None of them linked the $1,900,000 that Bart had paid over to state, county and ward level organizations in Maryland with the rest of the money that had poured in from outside the state for this totally unknown candidate. If a man didn’t have that kind of money to spread around, he wouldn’t be allowed to run for the Senate anyway. They didn’t make this connection because they were told that Simms had a limited amount of “inherited” money and they supposed his uncle, a power broker, was helping out for his own reasons. They believed the rest of the money was genuinely from the people because it was so profitable to believe it.
Smelling big money, the professional politicians of seventeen of the most populous states of the Union began to instruct the captive political press about Senator Simms’s destiny, his charisma and his man-of-the-future profile. The grand message was repeated in print, on the air and in front of TV cameras hundreds of times as early as 1974. Senator Simms remained aloof from the constant insistence that he was the next president. But he would be, every man and woman who made a direct living out of it knew that. As these party sachems bayed and tipped, Senator Simms went out after them to nail them down on their home bases.
He began with Pennsylvania because Senator Marvin Karp was already prospering so very we
ll in the national heroin industry due to Bart’s own invitation. Senator Karp took Senator Simms to Harris-burg to “meet the boys” five weeks after Bart’s induction into the Senate. Bart hired national committeemen to do “research” for his candidacy. The fees were deposited in a Nigerian bank or in Switzerland—as they chose. By the end of Bart’s first year in office, while remaining respectfully silent, thereby earning the respect of his fellow senators, Bart was able to retain the “research services” of national committeemen and state chairmen from seventeen of the stronger key states.
In the ninth week after his induction, Senator Karp took Bart along with him to one of the Agatha Teel Thursday “cook-outs” that had become so important. There Bart met eight of the members of the Council on Foreign Relations (the lay body which was called “the real State Department” until Mr. Kissinger became Secretary). Bart felt himself persuaded that it would be smart if he were to attend Teel dinners every Thursday and used what charm he had on Teel to have himself invited again. As weeks went on he appreciated Teel’s tact and wisdom. He liked to think that they had become friends.
In the summer of 1975, Senator Simms accompanied Teel to open a clinic in Harlem. Three weeks later he accepted an invitation to attend the presentation, at the New York Daily News, in the presence of a cross-section of leaders of the eastern Negro community, of a Golden Disc for Teel’s latest recording, “Dance on Me, Baby,” which had sold 1,200,000 copies, from which Miss Teel donated all proceeds to the Black Easter Bunny Fund. They were photographed. In the picture, which ran in the Daily News, were Miss Teel and the Senator; Binchy Dawes, a community leader; and, somewhat in the background—to Senator Simms’s dismay—Joseph Palladino. The next day Bart telephoned Teel. “How did that man get in the picture?” he asked abruptly.
The Whisper of the Axe Page 20
