After the meeting broke up, Morehouse indicated to Frank Barrow that he should stay behind. “Frank, is there anything new on Operation Belladonna?” the president asked.
“I spoke to Charlie this morning before I came down,” said Barrow. “The special handler his section recruited has completed his crash course at SoI and he’s in Missoula now, conferring with the girl’s family, the ones who remained in the Republic after Longview. They’ve agreed to cooperate, and assist in the first contact. The special op has been provided with everything he needs by way of documents, and he’ll be leaving for La Cesspool Grande tomorrow, although it will take him a few days’ travel time to get him to the place they’ve selected for him to pop onto the American grid in order to fit in with his cover identity. Once there the D.C. station chief will brief him. He will probably try to make initial contact in five or six days.”
“I hope this works out,” sighed Morehouse, shaking his head. “There is still so much we don’t know, and most of it we can only get from somebody who is deep, deep inside the belly of the beast. Most important of all, when the hell are they going to hit us? We have to know in time to make sure we can get all the reservists mobilized, and get the Bluelight batteries in place, and a hundred other things we can’t do until we have confirmation, so we can kick in Plan Seventeen. Forty-eight hours, Frank, that’s all I ask, forty-eight hours’ notice! God has given us so much in the past seventeen years, since that day they came for Gus Singer and his children and white men finally got up off their knees! Is it too much to ask for one more sign of His favor? Forty-eight hours?”
* * *
That night in Missoula, Lieutenant Robert Campbell, Junior sat down to the dinner table at his in-laws’ home on Randles Street in East Missoula. It was a quiet and somber affair. The family knew that Bob was leaving the next day for an undisclosed location for an indeterminate period of time, and that he would be out of contact for the duration of that time. They knew it was something serious, but that was all. His mother-in-law Lorna just thought it was a work thing for the Guard, some kind of secret investigation. Robert was content to make that the official story, but he wasn’t fooling anyone else.
Bob was lucky he had been able to come back for a brief visit at all; the original plan was that he was to be shipped right out after he got through at the School of Intelligence on Whidbey Island. At the last minute, it had been decided to clue Clancy and Kevin Myers into what was going on, so that they could give Bob personal messages he could deliver to Georgia when they met, adding to his credibility and persuasive power. Bob was glad he could bring the Myers men in on it, since he not only felt the loss of his childhood friend Peanut almost as keenly as they did, but he owed the professor a big favor. It was at the university that he had met his future wife, courtesy of Clancy Myers.
Eight years before, Bob had been a 19-year-old national serviceman just out of the School of Infantry at Fort Matthews, sporting full corporal’s stripes indicating he had maxed out the course. He was home on a week’s leave before reporting to his permanent unit at the Oroville border crossing into Canada, where he would spend the next sixteen months assisting fleeing migrants trying to Come Home, hunting down infiltrators coming in to spy and to plant land mines, and getting gloriously drunk in the NCO’s mess. Like most young men in a uniform, Robert wanted to show it off, and so he had swaggered over to the university to see his brother-in-law, the Chancellor Jason Stockdale, and his old friend Dr. Clancy Myers. Kevin Myers, being almost a year younger, was just starting his own military training at Fort Lewis himself, and so was absent that day.
Jason and Jason’s wife, Bob’s sister Jennifer, had treated him to lunch in the faculty lounge and introduced him around to some new faces he didn’t know, and then he had dropped around to Clancy Myers’ office to say hello. Clancy was now head of the combined Culture and Literature Department, which included the study of all the great writers and philosophers and poets of the Western canon and heritage. He supervised a staff of over sixty academics and their teaching assistants, taught two courses himself, and was always ready to sub in the classroom any time another professor was ill or otherwise unavailable. Immersing himself in his work had been his way of dealing with his daughter’s loss.
Bob was seated in Clancy’s office going over the usual stock in trade tales of basic training and military derring-do with the older man when the door opened, and in walked a young goddess, short and voluptuous, with a single blonde braid down her back, wearing a long, flowing blue velvet dress. She was bearing a stack of file folders like they were garlands to be laid reverently on a smoking altar in a forest glade, instead of plopped into a middle-aged egghead’s in-basket. Robert had leaped to his feet before the girl even looked at him, and when she turned her ringed eyes of crystalline blue on him, Robert only barely managed to shut his gaping mouth in time. Then he stared desperately at Clancy.
It had only been four years since the Revolution, but already mores in the Republic were changing due to a combination of subtle and not-so-subtle pressure and indoctrination from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education, and also because of a nearly instinctive desire on the part of the people to get back to the older and better ways, in every aspect of life. In the old American days, Robert would have practically chased the girl down the corridor gabbling every suggestive and flirtatious pick-up line in his repertoire, although actual touching would not have been allowed at that point due to considerations of political correctness. Depending on how she felt inclined toward her new admirer, she would either have responded with more of the same, implying that a squelch session in the near future was a distinct possibility, or else if not, she would have blown him off in the language of a nigger bitch. Throw in some crack and negroid hip-hop and raunchy tattoos, and that was the way such things were done in Amurrica.
But already social mores in the Northwest Republic were changing, going backward with amazing speed, as a whole people desperately tried to climb back on board the ship from which they had been hurled by Jews generations before. It was now understood by young men and women of their age that they were civilized white people, and not negroid animals in heat. Certain ancient courtship rituals were now once again required, such as an actual introduction, before the dance could begin. Simply walking up to a girl on the street or in the halls of a university and trying to force an acquaintance now came under the quaint, archaic description of an unwelcome advance, or even the century-old Guys & Dolls term of a “mash.” It invited a slap from the young lady or a physical assault from any nearby male relative. It also marked the young man who attempted it as a boorish whigger, and probably ruined his chances with the girl for good. Without an introduction, Robert was screwed at the starting gate.
Robert stood to attention, cleared his throat, and barely restrained himself from yelling at Clancy to be introduced. The girl was lingering and she didn’t seem averse, but they could hardly stand there like statues for minute after minute. Clancy stared back at Robert owlishly, puzzled as to what he wanted, and then he glanced at the girl and it hit him. “Oh, of course, where are my manners? Millie, this is Corporal Robert Campbell of the Defense Force, Fourth Infantry Brigade up at Oroville, or he will be. Robert, this is Millie, one of my part-time admin assistants from the high school. She graduates in June and she’ll be doing her Labor Service here at UM along with night school for a teaching degree, and so she’s getting a head start on things now, after school.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Millicent,” said Robert, ridiculously trying to sound like Rhett Butler.
“It’s Milada,” said the girl in a firm, pleasing contralto voice. “Milada Horakova. It’s Czech. My family is from Chicago, and before that from Bohemia. We Came Home in the year after Longview.” The girl extended her hand, which Robert took. Hand kissing wasn’t on the Ministry of Culture’s cards yet, so he merely gave it a quick firm clasp.
Clancy took in the situation at a glance. “Millie, I think
you’re done for the afternoon.” She wasn’t, but all three of them got it. “You can clock out now.”
“I need to get going myself, Doctor Myers,” said Bob. “Have you got a car, Miss Horakova?” Many people in the Republic didn’t any more; not only was the fuel situation still a little dodgy, but there was no longer any need for them in any city or town because there was now safe, clean, efficient and nigger-free public transport. “If not, I would be happy to give you a ride home.”
“Thank you, Corporal Campbell,” she said demurely. “Let me clock out and get my coat. I’ll be back in a minute.”
After she had left, Clancy said, “So far as I know, she’s unattached, but she brought her family to our Independence Day bash last October, and I should warn you that she had a father and a brother both the size of tanks on either side of her. I get the impression that trifling with that young lady’s affections is rather high on life’s Not Recommended list. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that they had a rough time with their Homecoming. Had to run the border with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Other than that caveat, lay on, McDuff, and damn’d be he who first cries hold, enough.” Before the week was out Bob had secured Millie’s permission to write to her from Oroville, since good old-fashioned letters were once again coming into widespread use in the absence of a nationwide internet e-mail system which would be vulnerable to monitoring and hacking by the Republic’s multifarious enemies. After several months of billets-doux, on his next leave Robert was formally brought before the family for inspection. Eli and Ed liked the cut of his jib, and the rest was history.
Tonight at dinner, Eli and Ed Horakova were grim and Millie was restrained. Even the children had caught wind of something going on in the outer world of the adults. Bobby Three, Bob and Millie’s five-year-old son, stared at his father and his mother with big eyes rather than his more normal practice of stuffing too much food in his mouth and pelting his three-year-old sister with peas when he thought no one was looking. Ida herself was just out of the high chair, seated on a plastic box topped with a cushion so she could reach the table. She wasn’t eating much, just kneading mashed potatoes with her fingers. Bob broke the silence by engaging their Horakova cousins, Ed and Janette’s brood, with questions and comments about school and eight-year-old Stan’s first marksmanship competition with air rifles. “You’ll be shooting for the Pioneers in the nationals, Stash,” Bob told him with a smile.
“I can’t join the Pioneers until I’m ten,” said Stanislas.
After dinner, Lorna and Janette took the children next door to Ed’s house to watch Kappy the Kike cartoons on disc. “You went to see Kevin and Clancy Myers this afternoon,” said Millie in the kitchen, as she cleared away the dishes.
“How did you know?” asked Bob.
“I was at the University for lunch with Tammy Myers. We thought you guys would come down to the cafeteria, but you didn’t.”
“No, Kevin and Clancy and I had some things to take care of,” said Bob. “I can’t talk about it, and neither can they, so please, don’t press any of them, Millie. No one can talk about this, for real. One day I’ll tell you what it’s all about.” If I make it, he almost added, but caught himself in time. “But for now it just has to be like this. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not going to Seattle on a secret investigation for the police, are you?” she asked, drying a dish.
“No,” he said. He owed her at least some smidgeon of the truth.
“I didn’t think so. This is something else, something that happened when you were in Olympia for two weeks.”
“Again, I can only tell you I’m sorry, Mil. It is what it is.”
“Yes, I know,” said Millie with a nod. “I’ve known you for eight years now, and I know you don’t lie and you don’t cheat. You met somebody in Olympia?”
“Yes,” he said. “There’s a reason why I have to be involved.”
“I can think of only one reason that would involve both you and the Myers. You’re going Out There to try and find that girl? The one who was stolen, the Lost Baby. Georgia. The one you and Kevin used to call Peanut.”
“How do you figure that?” asked Bob.
“You’re a Guardsman, you’re not in BOSS or any of the spook agencies, and yet somebody like that tapped you for whatever this is. There must be something special about you. Then you spend several hours huddled with the surviving relatives of a Lost Baby, so she must have something to do with it all. She hasn’t come back, or I assume she’d be here in Missoula and we’d be having her over to dinner to tell us about all her adventures in the mouth of hell. So she’s still outside the Republic. My guess is that for some reason that has suddenly become important, you’re going Out There to collect her and bring her back.”
“Bring our little girl home, Bobby,” Clancy Myers had asked him that afternoon, with tears in his eyes. “Please, bring our little girl home!”
“Dad, she’s not our little girl any more. Wherever she is, she’s a grown woman now,” Kevin told his father. “God knows what she’s like after spending the last twelve years growing up with Amber and her fruitcake grandmother scrubbing her brain a nice bright pink. She may not want to Come Home, Dad, and we need to be ready for that.”
“No, Kevin, you don’t get it,” Clancy had said, shaking his head. “You will if Tammy’s next baby is a daughter, though. Sons grow up and become men, but daughters are always your little girl, no matter what happens.”
“Damn, you should get your own detective shield,” said Robert now to his wife, shaking his head in admiration. “Millie, straight up, keep all this to yourself. Loose lips here can get people killed. No joke.”
“Including you?” asked Millie.
“I’m not going to get killed, honey. This is just something that has to be done, and I’m the one who has to do it. I’ll tell you when time and place shall serve, as Shakespeare said.”
Eli and Ed were harder to put off. “Good luck, son, whatever it is,” his father-in-law told him, shaking his hand. “Any idea when you’ll be back?”
“Some months at least,” he said. “Millie will be getting a call every couple of weeks from someone in Olympia just to tell her I’m okay, and it won’t be a lie. They won’t tell her anything else, but they won’t lie to her, so if they say I’m all right, she can believe it. If anything happens to me, she’ll be notified.”
“Millie and the kids will stay here with us while you’re gone.”
“Thanks, Eli,” said Bob.
“How likely is it that you’re not coming back at all?” the old man asked him bluntly.
“I just swore to Millie, I plan on coming back,” said Robert. “I mean to. But this is a delicate job, and anything could happen.”
“Anything to do with this latest invasion scare?” asked Ed, now as tall and as powerful and dour as his father.
“What invasion scare?” said Robert. “I haven’t heard anything.”
“Bullshit,” said Ed.
“If not, you’re the only one who hasn’t,” said Eli. “We do have a media in this country, and you’re right, they don’t tell us much on some things, but what they do tell us is straight up. Reservists being called up for extra training, including Ed here, Tommy’s Pioneer troop at the high school getting sudden notice of a big nationwide exercise in June. All kinds of programs on TV about preparedness, stocking up on food and fuel and water. We can put two and two together. So they’re finally coming for us from Out There?”
“There’s always that chance,” replied Bob carefully.
“Yeah, sure. Okay, you can’t say. I get it.” Eli looked him in the eye. “All I can do is give you my word, Bob, that if Amurrica comes for those kids, they’ll have to go through me first.”
“And me,” said Ed.
Bob knew the story of the family’s flight from Cicero, and he knew these strong and angry white men meant what they said. “Thank you both. That’s good for me to know.”
Later on that night, Rob
ert Campbell stopped by his sister’s house, the Chancellor’s official residence on campus. Jenny was getting her own children to bed, and then she came down and joined her brother and her husband in the living room. The once pretty girl had become a mature and beautiful matron of strength and dignity, and Jason was now entering an early middle age, which one understood would be the prime of his life. “You know I always envied the hell out of you two,” Bobby confessed to them, although he’d said it before. “The lives you led with the NVA. I was just a kid at the time, and I know that like most kids I was romanticizing danger and violence and terror into something it isn’t. I’ve picked up that much in the cops. But now this thing has come up. I can’t tell you any of the details, and I can’t tell you why I of all people drew the short straw and got picked for this, but I guess you can figure out that I’m not going undercover to bust car thieves or burglary gangs in Seattle. I’m going Out There, and it’s going to be pretty hairy.”
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