The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Okay, so we’re part of the Portland Brigade. How will that work? What, exactly, do you want us to do?” asked Charlie Washburn.

  “D Company will be responsible for a very large turf, and you’ll probably end up being the biggest company in the brigade,” Morehouse told them. “Eventually you may even become a separate brigade, but for now we need you working with the boys in Portland. Urban units will necessarily have to be smaller and more compartmentalized, since most of the action will be in the cities due to the fact that there will always be more targets for us there. In theory, you guys’ operational area will be everything from the Portland city limits down Highway 30 along the south bank of the Columbia River, and then on down the coast along Highway 101 to about Tillamook or so. In actual practice, we could send you anywhere in the Homeland, or for that matter anywhere in North America, if there’s something that needs doing and we think you’re the best guys for the job. Your first duty will of course be to clear this North Shore area of all enemy forces and non-whites, but a very important secondary duty will be to provide backup and support for the Portland units, hideouts for them when they’re hot, supplies, training areas and logistics, safe caches for arms, lab facilities for EOD units, whatever they need.”

  “EOD?” asked Washburn.

  “Explosive ordnance delivery units. Bombers,” said Morehouse.

  “Define enemy forces,” requested Hatfield.

  “Anyone who is part of the federal apparatus of control and enforcement, or who assists in maintaining the Zionist occupation, or who gives aid and comfort to the régime,” Morehouse explained. “Military personnel, of course. FBI and Homeland Security agents, obviously. Certain local police but not all; that’s a special problem I’ll go over with you later. Some of the cops will be on our side, or at least willing to stand aside and let us get on with it. State and federal judges and anyone to do with the court system, and all lawyers. There are a few good lawyers and they go on a special don’t-shoot list, but they’re going to have to find another way to make a living. The enemy court system comes to a screeching halt, period. Anyone to do with the prison system—we want to make them move all those nigger and Mexican criminals the hell out of the Homeland, because in a pinch they might release thousands of gang-bangers and drug-addicted scum to attack the white population and create confusion and diversion. There are a number of white prisoners we want released to join us, but they’re a special problem and will be dealt with at a higher level than yours, unless your company should be specifically brought in on any such operation. Federal bureaucrats of any kind, but especially anyone to do with the IRS or revenue collection. One of the keystones of our strategy is that from now on, not one more dime we can prevent goes to Washington, D.C. from the Pacific Northwest. Elements in the media and the civilian population who actively support the régime or propagandize for it. And of course, anyone with skin the color of shit is henceforth persona non grata in the Northwest. Believe me, Zack, you won’t lack for targets. Basically, your job is to make sure that from Beaverton on down the river to the sea, ZOG’s writ doesn’t run anymore.”

  “That’s a mighty big stretch of territory,” commented Ekstrom with a frown.

  “Yes, but the potential is immense,” replied Morehouse with a smile. “I don’t know if it’s hit you guys yet, but you’re sitting right in the middle of perfect guerrilla country here. Huge expanses of heavy forest, mountains and ravines where you could hide an army, and where maybe we will someday. Small towns scattered far apart, connected only by long, twisting highways where an ambush can lurk around any corner. Endless back roads and isolated houses and trailers and old mines and logging camps where you can meet and train, and where you can disappear when the heat comes down. Weak, scattered, and disconnected enemy forces in small outposts that can be isolated and taken out or forced to evacuate, and the whole area a backwater that the feds won’t want to expend much on in the way of effort or manpower, because their main fight will be in the cities—and yet your small band of Volunteers can quite possibly force the government into committing tens of thousands of men and tens of millions of dollars to try and keep you contained, because you’ve got a main enemy artery of supply right out your front door,” he went on, gesturing through the window toward the river. “Huge container ports at Portland and Longview where billions of dollars of goods are trans-shipped coming and going every year. Do you realize the economic chokehold we could apply on the United States if we succeed in shutting down the Columbia shipping pipeline to the Asian rim, as well as Seattle and Tacoma? I say to you again, comrades—in our kind of war, it’s never the generals who cry halt. It’s the accountants!”

  III

  In Shadow

  Let every man among you task his thought,

  That this fair action may on foot be brought.

  King Henry the Fifth, Act I, Scene 2

  It wasn’t for another week that Morehouse was able to set up a meeting between Zack Hatfield and First Brigade Commandant Tommy Coyle. Len Ekstrom arranged through the Helping Hand temporary agency for Hatfield to be permanently “employed” as a stocker and general dogsbody in the hardware store, thus providing Hatfield with a steady cover job and also giving him time to spend getting the new D Company organized. Then Hatfield got an e-mail from “General Okeke Okezi, former Nigerian Army Chief of Staff,” composed in pidgin English and asking him for his assistance and his bank account number to transfer “much of foreign currencies” out of Nigeria. Red Morehouse had gone over with him a series of code words that enabled him to decipher the NVA message, and the next day he took a bus into Portland, which was stopped at the off-ramp going into downtown and searched by nervous city cops and Oregon State Police with sniffer dogs. Hatfield was glad he had obeyed his orders and come unarmed; such random searches were becoming common in the cities. Hatfield was met at the bus station by a shabbily dressed, unshaven man of about 50 who walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Are you Fred Johnson?”

  “No, Fred’s my brother,” replied Hatfield. He followed the man out onto the street to a battered pickup truck. In a few minutes they were driving down the sleazy strip malls of 82nd Avenue. Zack noticed that police cars were now patrolling the streets of Portland in pairs. The driver said nothing, and Hatfield decided not to try and engage him in conversation. He was surprised that the silent man made no effort to conceal from him where they were going, until he pulled up behind a tavern. They got out, and his chauffeur walked up to a large dirty white RV and opened the door. Hatfield entered the vehicle and found two men inside waiting for him, sitting behind the tiny kitchen table, Red Morehouse and a large square-built man in a black pullover sweater, with close-cropped brown hair and a face that looked chiseled in Donegal granite, in which two cold blue eyes seemed to flicker like gas jets. He was carrying a Glock 9-mm pistol in a shoulder holster. “Have a seat, Lieutenant,” said Morehouse formally. “This is Commandant Tommy Coyle.” Zack was a powerful man with a powerful grip, but Coyle’s ham-like fist almost crushed his fingers.

  “Red tells me you’re a former rah-rah,” rumbled Coyle. “So was I. 75th Infantry, Dynamic Entry Unit.”

  “75th, Recondo,” replied Hatfield. “You guys were the door-kickers. At one point your life expectancy was what, three weeks?”

  “In a good month,” said Coyle. “I got a steel plate in my head from one time when we kicked in the wrong door in Ramadi.” His accent was Yankee. Hatfield guessed Boston or New York. He heard the front door of the vehicle close and the engine start up. He glanced over and saw that the man who had picked him up was behind the wheel, and he felt the RV pulling out of the parking lot. “Red says you’ve told him why you want to party down with the Volunteers,” said Coyle as the RV pulled out into the street. “You convinced him. Now convince me.”

  Hatfield wasn’t offended; he understood the need for suspicion and precaution and he knew that in a movement like the NVA, trust and comradeship was not something that
would come overnight. It had to be carefully forged and then tempered in the fire of combat. Nothing loath, he started talking. He was lucky in that Coyle’s bullshit detectors were excellent and they detected none; it occurred to him that if Coyle had sensed anything off kilter about him he wouldn’t be seeing the bus station again. But Coyle sized him up and at some point, he approved. After a time Zack could feel the conversation easing into serious business between colleagues. “So what does the big picture look like?” he eventually asked.

  “A lot of thought has gone into the question of how the revolution in the Northwest will flow, so to speak, with relation to the urban-rural question,” Morehouse explained. “Mao’s classical dictum was that you always take the countryside first and the cities last. That’s fine for the Third World, but it doesn’t always work. There are a hundred other factors that come into play. That countryside-to-city flow worked in China and in Cuba, then Che Guevara tried it in Bolivia and fell flat on his ass. The Iranian revolution was almost entirely urban, the Afghan resistance against the Russians and later the Americans was almost entirely rural, and the Iraqi insurgency is a well-balanced hybrid of both, although in Iraq the resistance has massive support of the people of a kind we don’t have yet, and they have more numbers than we’ll likely have for a long time.”

  “They also have massive world opinion on their side and beaucoup outside sources of supply, as well as recruiting and training bases across every border,” Zack reminded him. “I remember one of the classes we got in guerrilla warfare from the TAC school in the Rangers. The instructor was an egghead professor type from some neocon think tank, and he told us that it’s always been considered that a completely self-contained insurgency based inside the country of operation, without foreign bases and outside supply lines, was impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible,” said Coyle vigorously. “We’re going to win this, period, end of story. We have to take that attitude right from the start.”

  “It always helps to have allies and exterior sources of aid, true,” agreed Morehouse. “But it’s not completely necessary. The Bolsheviks had none in 1917, and the Provisional IRA and the Taliban always made do with a minimum. We will eventually develop some outside resources, of course. A lot of people across the world want to see the United States go down, and they’ll be willing to help once they observe that our men have the right stuff and we are seriously pinning down American forces which would otherwise be used against their own countries. The Russians in particular won’t have any objection to stepping back up to superpower status while we mangle ZOG from within. Bear in mind that there are certain advantages in fighting from within the belly of the beast. For all the incipient collapse and waste of the past three generations, this is still the richest country on the face of the earth. Everything we need to fight and win is right here; we just have to take it.”

  Coyle nodded. “You’re right, Red. It’s all there just waiting for us to stiffen our spines and take it. We need weapons and ammunition? We don’t need gunrunners from outside. There are enough guns left in private hands in this country to get us started, guns we can beg or buy, or just take. From then on it’s simple. We fight and kill the enemy and then we take their weapons and ammo. The Old Man always said that gun control was never really that important an issue. There was no point in having a right to keep and bear arms if we were never going to use it. How many right wing cranks have we all known down through the years who had a whole rec room full of guns, all gathering dust and rust, not one of them ever used to fire a single shot in anger at the real racial enemy?”

  “Oh, I have seen some private arsenals in the hands of right wing eccentrics that would make us all drool with envy,” Morehouse chuckled. “Rusting away while the owners got older and older and more senile, until they died and their liberal asshole kids gave the guns to the police. Weapons kept obsessively clean and well oiled—and never taken out of the closet even when things were at their worst. It’s like the Old Man always said—once we get some iron in our souls, we’ll find a way to get some iron in our hands.”

  “We need safe houses, training and staging areas?” Coyle continued. “The Pacific Northwest is huge; the feds simply won’t have the manpower to put a soldier behind every Douglas fir tree. Remember how it was, Zack, when we tried to occupy Iraq with only 140,000 men? There were hadjis behind every window and in every ditch, and we never knew where they were. The Northwest Homeland is at least three times the size of Iraq, and most of it is heavy forest and mountain, not empty desert. Screw outside help. It’s all here for us, if we’re man enough to use it. We have to get rid of this attitude that the federals are somehow better than us or superior to us. They aren’t. They’re not the bosses in this land anymore. We are. The police and the FBI are no longer the baddest motherfuckers on the block; the NVA is. The NVA does not fight on the defensive. They do. They don’t hunt us. We hunt them. We can get all the weapons and ammo we need with a little hustle, explosives as well, plus what we can make ourselves. If we run short on anything else, we can always just raid the local Mighty Mart. Our sources of supply are right under our nose. We’ve got the elbow room to float like a humming bird and sting like a bee. This is a spiritual problem, not a material one. What we need are men and women with enough balls to pull the triggers and live the life.”

  “The size and terrain of our new country is in our favor,” pointed out Morehouse. “A completely self-contained revolt might have small chance of success in some small and overcrowded country like England or Belgium, or some tiny state like Vermont or New Hampshire here, where the occupation forces can monitor pretty much everything and bring their superior forces to bear on any point quickly. This is the problem the Palestinians have always faced. They’re trying to fight in a strip of land the size of a postage stamp, crowded in like sardines with their own people. But here in the Northwest we’ve got room to maneuver.”

  “Maneuver exactly how?” asked Hatfield.

  “What the Army Council finally decided on is a series of small crews raising as much hell as possible in the cities, to keep the enemy forces mostly occupied in the urban centers, and make even fewer troops and cops available for large stretches of countryside and small towns like the North Shore where your company will be operating, Zack. This should make your job in this area a lot easier, since hopefully they’ll be so occupied protecting their own institutions and people in Portland that they’re just not going to be able to spare much in the way of manpower to chase you and your boys over hill and dale through hundreds of square miles of forest, or go rooting around for you in every isolated farm and logging camp. For the first year or so, in addition to direct operations against all federal authority and personnel in general, we want the combat crews to concentrate on gofers.”

  “On what?” asked Zack, puzzled.

  “General Order Number Four,” said Coyle. “GO-4 enforcement actions. Gofers. Get it?”

  “Uh, refresh my memory,” said Zack.

  “Oh, that’s right, you haven’t yet seen the NVA General Orders for the State of Emergency, as we are officially calling our little insurrection,” said Morehouse. “They’re based on the last proclamation of the provisional government of the Northwest American Republic from Coeur d’Alene, officially transferring authority to the Army Council for the time being. Later on it will be known to the history books as the Northwest War of Independence. I’ll get you a copy soon, but we try to keep those few and far between. Under the new Homeland Security regulations it’s now a death penalty offense to be found in possession of them, along with the Protocols of Zion and certain specified books.”

  “Yeah, I hear Mein Kampf is now being pulled from public libraries and you have to register your privately-held copies,” said Zack in disgust.

  “Hate to see any of our lads or lassies get the cyanide needle just for a piece of paper,” Morehouse sighed. “American bastards! Anyway, General Order Number Four orders all non-whites and homosexuals to leave the
three basic Homeland states and anywhere else we’re operating. Henceforth all non-whites, especially Jews, are considered to be legitimate military targets and are to be destroyed on sight, in theory. In practice, your job will not be to run around slaughtering blacks and Mexicans en masse. Your task is to drive them out, if you see the difference. Dead or vamanos doesn’t matter, we want them gone.”

  “Oh, they’ll get gone,” said Tommy Coyle grimly.

  “It is absolutely vital that we whiten up the Northwest, and fast,” said Morehouse. “Every non-white, every Jew, and every bugger boy is a potential enemy asset, a pair of eyes and ears for the feds, a potential enemy soldier who by the very nature of who and what they are can only seek to do harm to us and to our people. That’s in addition to all the problems they cause with their usual crime, violence, drugs, and monkey music. Right now the federal government has a vast pool of millions of willing assets, activists, and soldiers, living right here among us. We have to drain that swamp. But what’s more important, the white people of the Northwest need to see a difference, a visible improvement in their lives. Fewer Mexicans especially. They need to no longer hear the babble of Spanish or ching ling ding in the local Safeway. They must no longer be confronted with sullen clerks and attendants in business places who don’t speak English. They must no longer stand an extra twenty minutes behind endless sets of Mamacita, Papacita, and seven little bambinos in the checkout line. They have to notice that all of a sudden there are jobs available once again. They should be able to open their windows on a summer evening and not hear jangling salsa music from a boom box or a passing low ride. They have to notice that all of a sudden there are doctors and medical services available again in the local hospital, so when little Timmy cuts his hand or falls off his bike they can take him in and not have to wait four hours in the emergency room because it’s flooded with non-paying wetbacks. They have to be able to walk down the streets of their towns and cities in safety, and not feel like they’re in Guadalajara or Hong Kong or Somalia. White people may not come out openly and support us, but they will notice these things, and in the privacy of their own thoughts, they will know who is responsible, and they’ll thank us for it.”