A Mighty Fortress

by H. A. Covington

  “Yes, and the Council is asking me to convey my congratulations,” said Morehouse “You all did very well.”

  “Did you catch that business about negotiations with the FdLR that sent the Americans scurrying?”

  “I did indeed. Looks like there’s other pots boiling on the American stove besides us! I think we just found another key to this whole business. It’s not only Israel!” said Morehouse.

  “Okay, I don’t know anything at all about this. If the Mexicans are agitating for their own piece of the American pie and getting close to getting it, I need as full a briefing as you can give us,” said Barrow. “Bearing in mind the nature of these phones, I’ll leave it up to your vast ingenuity how you get us the information.”

  “Let me ask the birdies,” said Morehouse. “Anything else you can tell me about what’s going on down there, again bearing in mind the phone problem?”

  “Had a brief private meeting with Stanhope, which I mention on the phone because it’s pretty much impossible to conceal anything that goes on in here,” Barrow told him. “Nothing of note, at least I didn’t detect anything. I think he just wanted to sound me out and see whether I’ve got horns and a tail. One thing, though. He seems to have this luscious leggy intern of the Hebrew persuasion hanging all over him, most likely doing the old Monica Lewinsky trick of an evening.”

  “Ah, yes, Hadassah. I’m not surprised. Well, it’s not as if Stanhope would ever be on our side in any case, but maybe he’s more pragmatic that we think, and that would worry them. I find it interesting that the Jews are sufficiently concerned about him to make sure he has his kosher cuddle toy when he’s tucked in at night. That also indicates to me they’re anticipating a long conference. Think you can rough it for a couple of months?”

  Barrow looked around him at the luxurious carpet, the purring air conditioner, the deep plush chairs and sofa, and the basket of fresh fruit on the table. “We’ll manage,” he said.

  X.

  “Lady, read my lips. We do not give a damn if you or anyone else

  is offended by anything we say or do.” – John Corbett Morgan

  After the raucous and rowdy press conference, the opening session of the negotiations the next day was almost anti-climactic. It more or less set the tone for the coming weeks.

  Five days a week, the NVA delegation got their wakeup calls from the desk at six in the morning, switched on the coffeemakers in the mini-bars for their morning caffeine blast, showered and shaved and cleaned their rooms, made their beds with fresh sheets provided by housekeeping, and put on their daily fresh dry-cleaned and pressed uniforms which had been delivered the night before and scanned for bugs by Doctor Doom. They delivered their non-political personal trash to the elevator on a housekeeping cart, which was collected by a UN peacekeeper in a blue beret and taken away, no doubt to be pawed over by the FBI garbologists. Emily told Cody she was going to put some empty condom wrappers in her trash, and she was shushed and scolded by Captain Chenault, who told her not to fuck around in any sense of the term.

  At seven thirty they all trooped down to the Sockeye Grill, which was the restaurant Barrow and Jane Chenault had selected for their use, where a generous buffet containing every breakfast food known to man was laid out for them. When pressed, America could still put on the dog in the luxury and conspicuous consumption departments, even if millions of poor and elderly people across the country were sitting down to a breakfast of powdered egg substitute and cat food.

  The American staff, military, and any delegates who weren’t having room service delivered to their suites congregated in the Pump Room, gleaming with gold and polished oak and red leather upholstery, for their own equally sumptuous breakfast buffet. Reporters were staked out in the Cascade Lounge, where the buffet was supplemented with a bar that was open twenty-four hours a day and led to episodes of drunken brawling, sexual pawing and slurping in corners, stewed skinny-dipping in the pools and fountains and the water trap on the golf course, vandalism and vomit among the Fourth Estate. Bibulous antics among the media personnel gave the peacekeepers and MPs their only real problems; they actually set aside one of the offices on the ground floor as a drunk tank for reporters.

  Each faction used separate stairs and elevators, and admission to the three restaurants and to the hotel floors was only for those with the appropriate color-coded ID cards: red, white and blue for American delegation, shocking pink for the media, and blue, white, and green for the NVA. For some reason those blue, white and green ID cards clipped to their uniform shirt pockets or worn on chains around the Volunteers’ necks seemed to irritate the American negotiators and the media more than almost anything else, with their implied equality. There were constant needling references to the green,, white and blue IDs from both sources and in media commentaries on the conference. The Swedish blue berets acted as escorts and traffic cops to keep the reporters away and avoid any accidental clashes and possible firefights in the lobby during transit. Everyone was nervous about the iron on the Volunteers’ hips. There were constant demands for the NVA delegates to be disarmed, and finally Barrow had to issue a direct order that any attempt to take away a Volunteer’s sidearm was to be regarded as an abrogation of the ceasefire and resisted with deadly force.

  Breakfast took about forty-five minutes, and then the NVA went back upstairs and gathered in several team briefings to plan the day’s activity. At ten o’clock sharp, the NVA negotiating team for the day entered the hotel’s main conference room, briefcases and laptops in hand, from one entrance, and the Americans entered from another. Prior to 10/22, before booming bombs and flying bullets had rendered the climate in Washington state unfriendly for capitalism, the Lewis and Clark had made a point of attracting major players in the corporate world for meetings, conventions, and retreats. The conference room was large and comfortable, equipped with every business and personal convenience including private rest rooms. These had been made unisex, one assigned to the NVA and one to the United States, to prevent any friction through casual contact in the can. Little flip-tags could be turned from the inside to show whether or not each john was currently occupied by male or female personnel of either faction.

  Looming over the long mahogany table was a large satellite television screen for video conferencing. On various occasions in the following weeks everyone from Red Morehouse, to members of the Army Council disguised in balaclavas, to the Canadian prime minister and the Secretary General of the U. N. dropped in to make a virtual appearance.

  There were also frequent observers in the sessions themselves from a wide variety of international bodies and governments, including one session attended by Premier Komarovsky while on a state visit to America. Komarovsky and his entourage came and said little, pointedly avoiding the NVA delegation whom everyone knew that Russia was secretly aiding, although they did manage to clean the hotel out of vodka. Only two people were not present in the flesh or electronically. President Chelsea Clinton’s face and voice were never seen on the screen, and neither was the Old Man, despite repeated demands by the NVA and despite the ease with which a satellite feed could have been arranged from his prison cell in Florence. “They’re holding him out to us like some kind of grand prize, in exchange for concessions, and then at the last minute they snatch him away,” growled Barrow with a curse, on more than one occasion.

  The negotiating sessions took place on weekdays from ten o’clock until one o’clock, with a two hour lunch break which the team took back in the Sockeye Grill, and then the meetings resumed again at three for two more hours until five o’clock. After five everyone knocked off and went back up to their rooms to get stuck in on the day’s accumulation of paperwork, writing of position papers, studying subcommittee minutes, writing press releases and sometimes doing media interviews, monitoring the news, and endless discussion and analysis of the day’s session. Supper was eaten when and as people got hungry, either down in the Sockeye on an a la carte basis, or else if there was a strategy session going hot
and heavy, they ordered room service.

  Barrow tentatively grew to trust the room service and kitchen staff as time went by, and there was no sign of poison or drugs or excrement in the food. “They’re rooting for us in the kitchen,” Lisa Napolitano reported. “Apparently the Zoggies are real assholes, rude and complaining, always finding fault with the food and the service, demanding specially cooked meals, so forth and so on. Plus they’ve got a rabbi down there and a special chef doing kosher meals for Galinsky and Weintraub and the Horowitzes, and the other observant Jews, and the rabbi has to inspect and sign off on the whole kitchen every day to make sure it’s pure and suitable to cook for the Chosen Ones, so that really frosts everybody’s cookies on top of everything else.”

  “I always figured they’d take the kosher food racket too far,” said McCausland complacently.

  “The media people are even worse, always drunk and feeling up the wait staff of both sexes. We never complain and we compliment them on their food and their service, plus that thousand a week in tips General Barrow has me slip the kitchen staff and our generous tipping policy in the Sockeye has done wonders. If I were Senator Galinsky or Mr. Weintraub, I’d be more worried about finding something unpleasant in the food than I think we should be.”

  Weekends were free, although that term was a misnomer, because every member of the team was always busy working on something to do with the conference or with presenting the Republic’s position to the people of the world through media manipulation. On their part, the American primaries generally left Longview on the weekends and flew back to Washington D.C. or wherever the mood struck them. On Sunday mornings would come the cable talk shows, where one or more of them would appear cursing and reviling the NVA delegates for intransigence, incompetence, ignorance and wicked racism in general. That meant that Sunday afternoons were generally spent in retaliation by the NVA primaries, who did interviews with the reporters who showed themselves the least hostile and whose coverage most closely approached some kind of balance.

  Oddly enough, the one among them who shone in this regard and who began to generate a kind of fan club among the reporters and viewers was John Corbett Morgan. When he wasn’t threatening bodily violence in the conference room, Morgan turned out to be a natural born media talent with a natural camera presence, a folksy raconteur with a pithy turn of phrase and a sharp country comment on every situation. An evil Jed Clampett, one of the talking heads called him. “Hell, who knows?” chuckled Morgan. “I may go into politics once we get the Republic.”

  The Sunday afternoon media counterstrikes in turn generally led to chilly Monday mornings which lapsed into recrimination and abuse over what had been said on television by both sides the previous day. It became very hard to get anything done at all on a Monday, since Mondays were all about the Sunday news shows. Finally, in September Seamus O’Connell was able to persuade the American delegate to stay the hell off the tube, and the NVA agreed to follow suit, which calmed things down a bit.

  The five primary Northwest American Republic negotiators were accompanied into the conference room by one aide each who sat behind their principal at small desks, and took notes, monitored the news or did quick research on laptops as needed, as well as running any errands outside the room that needed running. In theory, they were the only ones who were supposed to leave the room during a formal session, but at one point or another during the sessions virtually everyone except Stanhope, Barrow, and Oliver Lodge blew up and stormed out, including the moderator O’Connell, who once got so disgusted he cursed them all in Irish, went into the Cascade Lounge, demanded Guinness and Bushmills, and ended up saying some embarrassing things of his own to the comment-hungry media, to the effect that it would be to the ultimate benefit of humanity if the entire North American continent burned to the ground.

  Cody sat behind General Barrow. Reverend McCausland was accompanied by his wife Mabel, a quiet and neat woman whom Cody hadn’t even realized was part of the delegation until he’d seen her get onto the copter that morning at Chehalis and later seen her in the suite she shared with Barrow and her husband. She never said anything except to whisper to her husband maybe once during each session. The other three NVA primaries had a different aide every day so that everyone in the delegation would get a chance to sit in on the sessions, so sometimes Cody got to sit next to Nightshade, and they passed notes like kids in school. On one occasion Howard Weintraub was ranting on about something and he saw one of their notes and demanded that O’Connell confiscate it and read it out loud. With a shrug, Cody passed the note down and O’Connell examined it and read it out to the assembled conference and into the minutes of the meeting.

  Emily had written Howie’s fly is open and Cody had scrawled back, Dead birds don’t fall out of the nest.

  The Americans were accompanied by their own aides, usually a military officer for Brubaker, for Galinsky a goat-faced woman with a moustache described as her “domestic partner,” and several secretaries and suits took turns backing Lodge and Weintraub. Susan Horowitz, as Leah now called herself, always sat behind Secretary of State Stanhope with a yellow legal pad on her knee, expensively dressed to the nines and looking like she’d just come from the hairdresser, calm and cool and efficient and a little amused, taking the occasional note and showing a lot of leg. She and Cody ignored one another. All of the NVA delegates were in uniform except for the McCauslands. Mabel McCausland was invariably dressed neat as a pin as if for church; Major McCausland again chose to wear a rumpled suit and carried no briefcase, just his Bible under his arm. “I have to admit, sir, the sight of that Bible freaks them out,” admitted Gair. “I think they’re scared you’ll start preaching.”

  “If they only knew, they’d be scared he’d start singing,” replied Mabel McCausland. It seemed to Cody that was the longest sentence he’d ever heard her utter.

  On weekdays the sessions would almost always begin with some complaint or other by the Americans about the behavior of the NVA and/or NDF during the previous twenty-four hours, involving alleged ceasefire violations, unkind remarks by NVA people around the Homeland, acts of violence against non-whites, loyalists, race-mixers, and homosexuals, and the Party’s habit of creeping annexation of real estate. On morning of August the second, as they sat down across from one another for the first time, Barrow was surprised to hear Weintraub open with a formal protest over the fact that the fledgeling Northwest Broadcasting Authority’s television station in Centralia was running old episodes of Amos and Andy from the 1950s which they’d found somewhere. “That’s the uppermost thing on your minds as we begin an historic event like this?” Barrow asked in amazement. “You’re upset about our telling nigger jokes?”

  “All right, that’s another thing we need to get clear,” snapped Jeanette Galinsky. “There are to be no racial slurs used in this room. You’re not in some redneck honky-tonk in Alabama! During these meetings you people are to conduct yourselves in a courteous and civilized manner!”

  “Yes, Mommy Dearest,” said Robert Gair contritely, and from then on Senator Galinsky had her official nickname.

  “You mean ah cain’t call you a plug-ugly kike bitch?” asked John Morgan innocently.

  “Who the hell do you think you are, talking to me like that, you goniff! You shlumpf!” screamed the Galinsky woman. “I am a United States Senator!”

  “John, I take Mommy Dearest’s point,” said Barrow. “No racial slurs. Plug ugly bitch is quite sufficient. And don’t shlumpf, sit up straight!” Things deteriorated from that point, and it took O’Connell an hour to get things back on track.

  That first day, and almost every day thereafter, the sessions periodically degenerated into carping sessions over the NVA’s use of so-called ethnic and racial slurs, which Barrow insisted on as a point of principle. At a news conference he said, “For years now white men and some women as well have been fired from their jobs, have had their children taken away and their families destroyed, have gone to prison and been tortured and mu
rdered simply for telling a racial or ethnic joke, or for displaying a Confederate flag or a Tricolor bumper sticker on their car,” he explained to the media in an impromptu session outside the conference room on one occasion. “ZOG has always sought to control white people’s thoughts in Orwellian fashion, by punishing the speaking aloud of certain words and ideas. The purpose of hate speech laws is to make white people so afraid that they might accidentally utter forbidden racial speech, that they censor themselves in their own minds from so much as thinking forbidden racial thoughts. No more! From now on we call a spade a spade, literally. In the novel 1984, Winston Smith wrote in his journal that freedom means the right to say out loud that two plus two equals four. As odd as it may sound, a large part of what we have been fighting for over the past five years has been for the right to say nigger.”

  “But that word is offensive to African-Americans!” wailed a woman reporter in stunned disbelief.

  “Screw African-Americans,” said Barrow succinctly, causing gasps of horror at his blasphemy.

  “Lady, read my lips,” spoke up Morgan, who was standing beside Barrow on this occasion. “We do not give a damn if you or anyone else is offended by anything we say or do. I want to say nigger, I’m damned well gone say nigger! As long as I am carrying this iron on my hip and I am willing and able to use it to defend myself and my right to think and to speak as I choose against those who would deprive me of that right, I’m gone say nigger all I want!” Agitated media reporters that night recounted disturbing reports from all over North America of white people breaking out in spontaneous cheers breaking out in bars and other places where these words were broadcast on television.