A Mighty Fortress

by H. A. Covington

  “You’re lucky you’re a general now, sir, or she’d have all kinds of fun with that one,” said Cody.

  “Both of you did a fine job,” said Barrow seriously. “I can see now why Bobby Bells thinks the world of you.”

  “Well, on the upside, I think we can safely say that school days are over for the both of you,” said Joe Dortmunder. “At this point it’s pretty clear that both of you are now so compromised that it wouldn’t be a good idea to put you on any more cloak and dagger stuff. There are simply too many people now who know you’re with the NVA.”

  “As much as I’d hate to leave A Company, sir, I’m not known in other parts of the Homeland and I can still work for Threesec in Portland or Spokane or someplace,” pointed out Nightshade. Cody was pleased to hear a note of genuine regret in her voice.

  “You could,” agreed Barrow, “But, and I hope you won’t take offense at this, comrade, I have to admit that I have some qualms about that. I always worried about you. My god, you’re what? Only seventeen?”

  “Uh, seventeen next month, sir,” she said.

  “Sixteen years old. Great. We’ve gotten you beaten up and kidnapped and endangered enough, Emily. The nature of the struggle is changing now and we can afford to start being a little bit less cruelly expedient, I think.”

  “But sir,” protested Cody, “We still have one thing we’d like to take care of regarding our summer school class. The Mitchell Newman project.”

  “Sounds like a rock group. Give it to Bells,” said Barrow. “Don’t worry, guys, we still need your talents. You’re a couple of sharp kids, and I’m going to need every brain cell I can get on my side down there at that circus of a peace conference. Plus we can use a little more diversity on our team, pardon the expression. I want to take at least five or six female comrades to show the public that the Republic isn’t going to be a boys-only club. I’ll clear it with Third Section so that Comrade Nightshade goes to Longview with us.”

  “Make sure you take your duckbilled platypus costume,” Cody told her. “You can do your song and dance on worldwide TV.”

  VII.

  “Life is a bitch, and then you die.” – Mitch Newman

  In point of fact, the one-act plays were never performed, nor did the young summer school actors at Hillside High ever get an opportunity to put on Arsenic and Old Lace. The drama class turned out to be missing its teacher. Mitch Newman might have been depraved, but he wasn’t stupid. He saw President Clinton’s speech on television and he read the handwriting on the wall, loud and clear. The high school was closed for the next few days due to the unstable situation, and Newman used that time to turn in his resignation, collect his last paycheck, and clean out his office while there was no one else around except one of the janitors.

  “Can’t say as I blame you for getting out, Mr. Newman,” said the custodian in overalls who had kindly offered to help Mitch pack his computer and his personal belongings. “Looks like things are really gonna be going to hell in a handbasket up here now. I wonder if I’m gonna have to learn how to speak German? Where ya headed anyway, Mr. N.?”

  “California,” Newman told him as he shuffled through several manila folders of documents, feeding them into the shredder one by one. “Careful with the computer! Put it in the box really easy. I don’t want the hard drive damaged, it’s got a lot of important stuff on it. I’m hoping things will have cooled off for me in Hollywood enough now so I can get a studio job again, screenwriting, maybe even some more acting. I suppose I can always go back to teaching down there. Beverly Hills High School wouldn’t be too bad a place to end up. I just can’t understand how the President could do something like this!” he moaned, still near hysteria over what he saw as the final betrayal of his people by the hated goyim. “I can’t understand why this horror won’t die! When I was growing up we thought we had won! We thought we were done with all this Nazi crap, that it all ended in 1945! That swastika, that godawful little man with that silly moustache, why won’t they stay dead? They just keep coming back, always on our trail hunting us down like some demon Hound of the Baskervilles! Two thousand years we’ve been suffering!”

  “As a great philosopher once said, life is a bitch,” commented the janitor as he eased the computer into the Styrofoam-packed heavy cardboard box.

  “Yeah,” responded Newman distractedly. “Life is a bitch, and then you die.”

  “And then you die,” agreed the janitor.

  The noose of nylon cord floated lazily over Mitchell Newman’s head and looped down around his neck, then tightened and bit. For several long minutes Newman gagged and gurgled, kicking and flopping like a fish hauled out of water on the end of a hook and line, clawing at his neck while the close-hugging killer in the janitor’s coveralls strangled him gentle and artistic, kicking and knocking over the chair and the wastebasket and the paper shredder. Newman’s bowels and bladder relaxed in death and emptied into his jeans, and filled the small cinderblock office with a nauseous stench. After the convulsions stopped and he slumped still and lifeless for several minutes, Bobby Bells released the garotte and let the corpse flop to the floor where it lay in a shit-stained heap. He put the garotte in his overall pocket. “Good night, sweet prince,” he said.

  A minute later Bells strolled into the high school parking lot and got into a nondescript Toyota Camry. Eddie Hagen started the car and they left at a sedate pace. “Any problems?” asked Hagen.

  “Nah.” As they pulled onto Interstate 5, Bells lit a White Owl and sighed. “You know, Eddie, it occurs to me that what with this peace conference and all, this may well be the last good old-fashioned NVA tickle you and me ever go on. I mean, it’s pretty obvious there’s going to be more fighting before we win the Republic, but it will be out in the open, more like a regular civil war type campaign. We’ll be wearing uniforms and everyone will know who we are and where we are. This may well be the last time you and me go out on a covert mission like this, wearing civilian disguises, hitting ‘em and then we disappear back into the underground.”

  “Hey, Bob, it’s progress,” replied Hagen. “Things don’t always stay the same, they change. We move on in life, you know? We been waiting to make this move up for a long time. But I know what you mean. Today will be kind of a nostalgia thing we’ll sit around and remember when we’re fat old farts.” They were silent for a moment, and then suddenly and spontaneously, both men burst out into a melody. They rolled down the interstate singing at the top of their voices and passably in tune, Bells flourishing his cigar out the window.

  “Thoooose…weeeere…the…days, my friend! We thought they’d never end! We’d sing and dance, forever and a day! We’d live the life we choose, we’d fight and never lose! Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days!”

  VIII.

  “It’s the Oxford accent, old girl. It makes me sound intelligent and James Bondish. Up for a spot of the old cloak and dagger, eh what?” – Nigel Moore

  The Northwest Volunteer Army established what amounted to a provisional capital in the Lewis County bandit country, in the twin cities of Chehalis and Centralia, Cody’s old home town. It wasn’t much of a homecoming for him, since nothing of his childhood really remained there. Two days after the President’s speech, around six hundred Volunteers quietly deployed from trucks and buses that rumbled into town in the pre-dawn hours and took over the local government offices, the police stations, and the major utilities to make sure that the water still flowed and the power stayed on. The local FATPO barracks out by the old steam plant was evacuated by helicopter, after John Corbett Morgan and Patrick Brennan moved a pair of 108-mm field artillery pieces that had fallen off a truck at Fort Lewis up to the gate, and made it clear that their presence was no longer required.

  Later that afternoon Cody took a detour in a Humvee newly repainted with NVA insignia, and pulled over to the curb at a small house on a back street off Harrison Avenue. It had been the last place he had ever seen his sister Gwen, on the morning It Takes A Village
came for them. The house was smaller than he remembered, and unpainted. There were children’s toys on the small lawn and a battered pickup truck in the driveway. It looked like another poor white family was renting the house from whatever landlord owned it now. A tired-looking woman peeped timidly out of the front window, clearly afraid of the young man across the street in the camouflaged vehicle with the Kalashnikov on the seat beside him. Cody sighed, smiled and the woman and gave her a wave, and drove on.

  Other FATPOs around the Homeland did not go quietly, and every day there was skirmishing between Fatties and Federal troops and the growing number of Northwest Volunteers. The Federal cops had won themselves an evil reputation, and now that the lid was off it was time to settle accounts. Hidden guns were being brought out from hiding, by ordinary white citizens who had nothing to do with the NVA, and a lot of sniping and ambushes went on. In some areas there were already reports coming in of white men and women who had been involved in interracial marriages or relationships ending up dead in the night, and local officials who had been a bit too zealously pro-American during the revolt woke up to find their homes burning over their heads. Cody heard rumors of something being organized called Force 101 which was to clean up the Homeland on a more methodical basis, but right now most of this activity appeared to be spontaneous, not carried out by the NVA as such, but by local people who had just plain had enough. It was astounding what the white man was proving capable of once he re-acquired that element of social approval, or at least absence of social disapproval, that appeared to be essential to his psychological makeup.

  The Army Council members and other major Party formations remained dispersed across the Homeland, to make sure that a single attack could not wipe out the entire rebellion’s command structure, but several major arms of a new administration were established in Chehalis, including the beginning of what amounted to an embryonic civil service. The new bodies included a media group which was already calling itself the Northwest Broadcasting Authority, that took over a local cable and UHF station and began broadcasting the rebels’ version of news and events along with anything else white they could find. Cody was amused to turn on the tube one day and find a Brady Bunch re-run.

  The rural areas of the new Homeland were not difficult for the rebels to take over. The Pacific Northwest was a huge place, impossible even for a mighty empire like the United States to saturate with soldiers, and it was this size that had given the NVA the vital maneuvering room and had taken the place of the foreign bases which had always been considered necessary for the success of any guerrilla insurgency. “Long ago there were some people who wanted to try and establish a Homeland in New England, or set up little enclaves in the Midwest,” Morehouse said once in Cody’s hearing. “That never would have worked. All other considerations aside, we had to pick a large area like the Northwest to give us scrapping room. In any smaller area the Feds could have concentrated their forces a lot tighter.” During the independence struggle, the Federal forces had always been scattered very thinly over the territory which lay outside the main population centers and the interstate highways that connected them. The rebellion had developed into a classic colonial war pattern. The cities and the daytime were under Federal control, but the countryside and the night belonged to the guerrillas. Within a matter of days after Chelsea Clinton’s speech, as the writing on the wall was read and understood, large swathes of rural Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana had seen an exodus of American military and paramilitary forces, American law enforcement, and American authority in the form of government officials and bureaucrats. They all seemed suddenly to take sabbaticals to Seattle or Portland or Spokane, anywhere they could get back under the shelter of Federal guns, or else they just left the Homeland altogether.

  The NVA didn’t have enough troops as yet actually to occupy most of this expanse of wilderness and small towns either, but it turned out that it wasn’t overly necessary. Once local government and local law enforcement was freed of the Federal monkey on their backs and white people could once again stand up and speak their minds, most rural counties displayed a remarkable degree of sympathy for the coming new régime. Tricolor flags were being raised on flagpoles in front of post offices and municipal buildings, and what remained of the Northwest’s non-White population outside the big cities quickly decided that the pastures were definitely greener elsewhere. Within a time so short as to leave everyone gaping in wonder, the fifty-year trend of “the browning of America” was halted and reversed everywhere but in a few metropolitan areas. Even those were now almost lily white in their population after five years of rebellion and bloody attacks against Third Worlders who didn’t get the message.

  The large cities and military bases were a different kettle of fish as far as the assumption of state power went. Significant armed Federal presence and administration remained firmly ensconced in Seattle, Portland, Tacoma, Spokane, Boise, and a few of the secondary metropoli such as Eugene and Medford and Yakima in the fruit country with its heavy remaining Hispanic population. There were also such large American military bases as Fort Lewis, Washington which were poised like a knife at the NVA’s throat. Their removal was one of the things which would have to be negotiated at the Longview conference. In those last days of July, there were repeated clashes across the Homeland between NVA and Federal authorities, as well as sporadic fighting between NVA and loyalist militias or gangs of various kinds. Thanks to the prompt action taken in Bellevue at the Assembly of God, and the groveling and repentant public confession of Captain Jesse Regenthal which was broadcast on television, the wind was pretty much taken out of the sails of the evangelical death squad idea, but there were still some occasional outbreaks of pro-Zionist fervor among fundamentalists. Many of these clashes were moderated and defused by the teams of UN observers who were flown into the area. At the Party’s insistence, these teams consisted only of White personnel, especially from Eastern Europe, Russia and Hungary and Romania and Poland. “Places where they know what a Jew is,” commented Frank Barrow. With a delicious sense of irony, the NVA Army Council had asked the UN for Serbs and Germans as peacekeepers, but the international body was never strong on humor.

  The NVA peace conference delegation’s working headquarters was a former antique mall on Pearl Street in Centralia. The large and stately Edwardian building had been found to be owned by Jews in Florida via several holding companies, and accordingly it had been impounded by the rebels. The small shops and display rooms had been cleared out, and a series of elegant little offices and conference rooms and barracks accommodation furnished from the inventory of antiques. The town of Centralia east of Interstate 5 had been declared off limits to American news media, and reporters who occasionally slipped into town and were apprehended were gently but firmly hauled out to the west side of the interstate and booted back into the media colony which had sprung up in the cluster of truckers’ motels there. “No rough stuff, as obnoxious as they are,” ordered Barrow. “We need to try and cut the hostility level with these people as much as possible.”

  “They’re calling Centralia the Forbidden City now,” laughed Emily as she and Cody stood by the TV which had been mounted in the conference room, watching the endless round of cable news. “We’re barricaded here in our secret bunker, hatching all kinds of nefarious Nazi plots!”

  “Well, we are,” said Cody reasonably.

  Cody’s head injury was healing up nicely, the stitches came out well, and he had hopes that his hair would be sufficiently grown back by the time of the conference so it wouldn’t be so noticeable. The upstairs lofts in the former antique emporium were converted to a dormitory for male personnel where Cody and others slept, and a smaller ladies’ country where Nightshade and several other female Volunteers had their bunks. The preparations for the beginning of the conference proceeded apace, as did the emergence of the NVA into public view. They learned that the site agreed upon for the conference was the spacious five-star Lewis and Clark Hotel, a resort sp
a about three miles outside the town of Longview itself. Set on twenty acres of landscaped grounds and built with a luxuriously timbered, hunting-lodge Northwest interior motif, the hotel had once been a watering hole for the west coast’s liberal and corporate élite, and it had everything from hot tubs in the suites and four restaurants and pubs to an Olympic-length indoor pool and an eighteen-hole tournament golf course. (“Secretary Weintraub and I can get in a few holes before breakfast,” commented Barrow.) Each delegation would be assigned a wing of the hotel, whence officially they were not allowed to cross over into their opponents’ territory, while a third wing would be assigned to a contingent of UN peacekeepers from Sweden and American military police from the Presidential guard detail, who would provide a few black faces for the television cameras. The fourth wing would be for specially vetted staff and a selected group of media personalities, raffled off in a kind of lottery to major networks.

  “Regarding those MPs, I didn’t like the idea of having any niggers around at all, but it’s one of those things the Council finally decided not to make an issue out of so we could keep things moving forward,” Morehouse told the growing NVA delegation with some concern. “Yeah, I know, we can be sure that at least a few of the MPs are going to be FBI or spooks of various kinds, as well as about half of everyone else there, the staff, you name it. Just be polite to them and keep contact to a minimum. They shouldn’t be in our part of the hotel, anyway. But always bear in mind that you will be surrounded by enemies.” There was an ongoing discussion via the intermediation of the UN and Red Cross committee as to whether or not the NVA delegation would be allowed to come in armed. “Okay, it’s obviously not a friendly gesture to show up with fully automatic weapons and ammo belts criss-crossing our chests,” Morehouse reported. “But there’s no way in hell we’re asking our people to go into the presence of their deadly enemies without at least sidearms. I’ll let you know how this one goes.” Access in and out would be by an unmarked Russian military helicopter, flown by a crew of Russians who were officially private contractors but were unofficially known to be military. The copter would be on standby and in theory, the NVA delegation could call for it and leave at any time. “If they let you and don’t start shooting as you try to leave,” added Morehouse.