The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “The tyranny under which we live may still wear a velvet glove on occasion, but it is unspeakably evil and brutal, and only greater violence and brutality will bring it down. This was their choice. They made it this way, not us. You guys have to understand that in order to win through to freedom, we Northwest Volunteers are going to have to become hard, hard men. The hardest history has ever known, because that hardness of soul is one of the few weapons we can muster against an incredibly powerful enemy who holds all the cards. Compassion and mercy are all very well, but they are luxuries that are possible only in a basically decent world, and that world is not this one. You are embarking on a journey that will become horrible beyond measure, but our fathers and grandfathers sloughed it off onto us. We dare not pass it on to our own children, because we are the last generation that will have a chance to do anything about all of this. Can you be the kind of hard and brutal men you must be, in order to give your descendants the kind of world they have a right to?”

  Lennart Ekstrom thought of the mangled body of his daughter, of her tears and nightmare cries in the night. “That will be no problem at all, sir,” he replied.

  IV

  Valentine’s Night

  I am bid forth to supper . . . But wherefore should I go?

  I am not bid for love: they flatter me:

  But yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon the prodigal Christian . . .

  I am right loath to go; there is some ill a-brewing toward my rest,

  For I did dream of money-bags tonight.

  The Merchant of Venice—Act II, Scene 5

  On the night of February 7th, all of D Company’s personnel assets got together in the Kiwanis Club hut, with the exception of Jerry Lundgaard and Christina Ekstrom, both of whom Hatfield had decided to keep completely in the background and as compartmentalized as possible. In addition to the original Trouble Trio, there were three new Volunteers in the beach shack. Tony Campisi was a short and stocky man in his mid-30s, a truck driver for one of the few local logging firms still in operation. Lee Washburn, Charlie’s younger brother, was there. A slimmer and grimmer version of his brother, like Zack Lee had been forced into day labor for the temp agencies, doing whatever kind of work he could get for a horrifyingly inadequate weekly minimum-wage check. Jesse “Cat-Eyes” Lockhart was there as well, a man now in his late 20s, his auburn hair long and unkempt, lean and keen, a slightly wild look on his stubbled face in his bloodshot eyes, but sober and eager. “I haven’t touched a drop since you talked to me, Zack,” he’d promised Hatfield, and Hatfield believed him.

  “This should probably be the most of us who ever assemble at one time in any one place,” said Zack. “The thing is, you all need to be in on this. Cat, you stick by the window and listen in, and keep a keen eye peeled for any movement outside or any sign of an approaching vehicle. You strapped?” Lockhart pulled a stainless steel .357 Magnum out from under his jacket. “Okay, let’s get down to cases.” They all sat down at the table except for Lockhart. This time it was Ekstrom who passed around the by now obligatory cups of instant coffee. Donner had been right; the men were starting to live on the stuff.

  “This is going to be a doozy of an opening number for D Company, and we’ve got one week to work out all the details,” Hatfield told them all in a cheerful voice. “We’re going to try for two major takedowns within 24 hours, the second one flowing from the first. This means we’ve got to plan and carry out the Goldman hit in such a way as to leave us windows of opportunity for the FBI attack. I’ve thought about this, and I think the best place to hit the feebs would be at the same place we do Jake and Irene. I am basing this on the assumption that the FBI, when they do show up to investigate this nasty horrible hatecrime, will be constrained to at least put in a token appearance at the actual crime scene and pretend they’re Sherlock Holmes looking for clues and dogs that didn’t bark in the night. I think it’s best to hit them there instead of trying to do anything at the Coast Guard station, if they show there, or around the courthouse or the sheriff’s office downtown, just yet. Astoria is a nineteenth century town, laid out for horses and wagons and not automobiles. The streets are narrow and congested. Making a getaway out of that confined area would be a bit on the risky side, especially in the daylight, plus I think attacking in or near an actual enemy building or installation is a bit beyond us as of yet. I want to do the Goldmans up close and personal, with handguns, so that the FBI and the cops don’t get an inkling that we have somebody of Volunteer Lockhart’s skill and stature on our side. We’ll introduce ’em to the boy on bigger targets than a couple of Jews. That’s why I don’t want you in on this first job, Jess. When they get here, I don’t want those feebs to suspect that a sniper’s clocking them, at least no more than they would anyway as a standard precaution. This means we’re going to have to cook the kikes outdoors, in an area with plenty of firing positions around it, which is vulnerable to Cat’s ballistic derring-do later on, most likely in the daytime. Our guys have taken a couple of long distance shots at them in Portland, but if possible I want the suits to think they’re safer out here and let down their guard a little.”

  “Why not tag the Goldmans outside their house?” asked Lee Washburn.

  “That’s one possibility, yes,” said Zack. “Although that’s a residential neighborhood, so we’d have to lay in wait somewhere, and there’s always the chance of nosy neighbors peeping out their windows and seeing something they shouldn’t. Plus we’d have to park the cars somewhere, and there’s more chance they’d be noticed and remembered by some little old lady walking her dog or something. I’m basing this on the assumption that a long-time married couple will most likely go out to dinner on Valentine’s Day, and so we need to find out where they’re going and if possible take them down at the destination. One of those yuppie fern places downtown would present problems of escape; even at night these narrow little streets and small blocks and blind intersections around here would be a bitch to do a high-speed chase through, if it came to that. We’ll be working downtown eventually, and so we’re going to have to figure out some way around that obstacle course, but for the moment we don’t have to. It seems our illustrious XO has achieved his first major coup as an intelligence officer.”

  “We know where they’re going?” asked Campisi excitedly.

  “Rigoletto’s Beanery on the 39th Street pier, reservations for 8 p.m. on February 14th,” said Hatfield. “You have the floor, Charlie.”

  “It’s amazing how you can pick up stuff about other people if you’ll just sit and listen and pay attention,” said Charlie with a grin.

  “Something all of us need to be doing, all the time,” put in Hatfield.

  “We lucked out like hell on this, and I didn’t have to investigate anything or do anything, just be in the right place at the right time with my ears open,” Charlie told them. “For the past couple of months they’ve had me down at the Tongue Point Job Corps depot. Instead of doing what I’m supposed to do for the Forestry Service and being out in the woods helping Mother Nature along, now my purpose in life is trying to teach disadvantaged urban yoot the ways of the forest, the ins and outs of the timber industry, basic woodcraft, culling and how to set a choker and how not to cut your own leg off with a chain saw. You can guess what kind of so-called students I’ve got, including some charming youth offenders and gang-bangers from Portland, whom I would suggest as worthwhile targets in themselves if they’re still here in a few weeks. I think there are maybe four white kids in my group. Then there are about a dozen wetbacks who don’t speak English. They snuck into the program courtesy of Bowater and Cascade Paper who want some free training for their cheap labor supply. Plus there are a couple of nigger kids from Portland who disappear into the woods and smoke weed most of the time. All at the taxpayer’s expense, of course.”

  “Sounds like our target list is growing,” commented Ekstrom.

  “Oh, yeah,” agreed Charlie with a vigorous nod. “Anyway, the state has also hired at taxpayers�
�� expense some so-called vocational aides, mostly yuppie wannabe mamis from some community college in Portland. They show up wearing those skirt-and-jacket dress-for-success business suits and carrying briefcases that contain nothing but their makeup and their lunch, and they act as so-called communications facilitators, i.e. Spanish interpreters. I had to learn some Spanish when I was in the U.S. Army after the invasion of Venezuela, but I never speak it with these women or when I’m working with the so-called students, and they either don’t know I hablamos Espaňol or else they don’t care. One of them is a girl named Conchita Ramos, and apparently she knows Kyle Wapner, the owner and manager at Rigoletto’s Beanery.”

  “I was in there once,” said Ekstrom. “Took Eva there for dinner, and unfortunately we’d already sat down before I saw the prices on the menu. I had to max out my one remaining Visa just for salad and a couple of sandwiches.”

  “It’s a trés chic watering hole for our Blue State élite, all right,” agreed Hatfield. “One of those places where if you have to ask the price of something, you can’t afford it.”

  “Yeah,” continued Charlie. “Wapner isn’t officially on our Jew list, although with that name I’m suspicious, but he’s on the liberal scumbag list. He toadies to the Goldmans and their ilk, probably because he makes his living off of them. I’d say he’s a future candidate for the hit parade himself as a race-mixer, because apparently he likes hot tamales. He threw a pass at Conchita and apparently he connected. She’s been showing off a new wristwatch and some snazzy new threads he’s apparently bought her, plus there’s been a lot of girl-giggle in Spanish. Anyway, getting back to the point, the other day I’m sitting in the break room having lunch, and Conchita and some of the other girls are over at another table. To them I’m just another middle-aged gringo guy with a big belly, and we’re invisible now. I doubt they even knew I was there, or it even occurred to them that I might understand what they were saying. I listened and I got an earful. It seems Wapner doesn’t speak Spanish, so he asked Conchita to run down his Valentine’s night program with his kitchen and wait staff. The Goldmans were a big part of it. They’ve got a special private dining room reserved, but get this—they’re not going to be eating off the regular menu. Goldman has ordered in a special ten-course glatt kosher dinner for two, flown in from, get this, some high-toned restaurant in Jerusalem. This special nosh is going to be coming in from Israel by chartered Lear jet and helicoptered in from Portland to our little airport, and then rushed to the Beanery by taxi, where Wapner will give it a quick warm in his ovens and microwave, specially rabbincally kosherized for the occasion, and serve it up to the happy hebes. Plus all the trimmings, kosher wine and hors d’oeuvres and whatnot, and the whole dining room covered in sheaves of roses. Total cost for this evening of conspicuous consumption, including a handsome backhander to Wapner himself for using his restaurant while not deigning to eat the same food as the rich goyim eat, will be over $60,000.”

  “Mother of God!” gasped Campisi.

  “Hey, you ever been to a rich Jew’s bar mitzvah?” said Hatfield sourly. “Among the hofjüden it’s not unknown for them to rent whole stadiums and spend hundreds of thousands on celebrity entertainers, exotic food and drink, and weird shit like having the bar mitzvah boy ride in on a baby elephant. The Jews are the high priests of conspicuous consumption.”

  “I’ve never even seen $60,000 in one place,” said Campisi in anger. “My family has to make do with meat twice a week, and that’s with me and my wife both working. My boys will never enter the door of a college because they’re males with white skins, and we’ll never be able to afford to send the girls either. My father died last year because we couldn’t raise a few thousand dollars to pay medical bills and the bastard clinic cut us off. Said the two of us made too much money for their assisted program. My mother is going to follow him soon, because we can’t buy her medicine, and if we put her in a state home some Paki doctor will decide she’s lived too long and shoot her up with poison under the Senior Citizens’ Quality of Life Act. And these Jew swine are spending sixty grand on a single night of lovey-dovey oy vay? They deserve to die for that alone!”

  “You want to back that up?” asked Hatfield quietly. “We’ll need a second shooter.”

  “You got one,” said Tony.

  “Good,” said Hatfield. “This new information gives us a perfect lay-out for both hits. Rigoletto’s Beanery is on the old cannery platform out over the river at the end of 39th Street. I paced it out this afternoon, and allowing for the curve of the access pier I make it almost an even two hundred yards from shore, an extra ten to the river walk. I’ll need the second car, that’s Lee and Charlie, to wait outside the Goldmans’ house and let us know when they leave. We’ve got some special cheapo cell phones for that purpose. After this double feature is concluded, the phones go in the river along with the e-pieces, the handguns we use. We need to make sure every piece of physical evidence vanishes, except for the vehicles, which we don’t have enough of yet to deep-six.”

  “Jerry Lundgaard is arranging for the Yukon to be re-sprayed afterward, legitimate plates put on, etc.” said Ekstrom. “He’ll be using one of his mechanics, a guy named Mackenson, whom Jerry recommends we speak to about joining us. For now, though, Mackenson will do what he’s told and won’t ask questions. Then we need to stash the Yukon up at that location I mentioned, unless it gets ID’ed, in which case we’ll have to make it vanish. Charlie, you and Lee will have a used Toyota from Jerry’s lot. The plates will be stolen but you’re only going to need it for a few hours in the dark, in a town that is still very lightly policed. We think the risk factor is acceptable. Jerry will ship it out the next day on an exchange with another dealership up in Seattle. These dealers do a lot of trading back and forth to keep their inventory flowing, one guy down here has too many Toyotas and another guy in Seattle or California has too many Nissans, so they level it out. Just try not to bring it back all shot up.”

  “If we do this right there shouldn’t be any shooting except the holes we put in Jake and Irene,” said Hatfield. “Charlie, once you see the targets leave the house, you call us and give us the signal. Tony and I will then pull the Yukon out onto the platform and into the parking area, get into position, and wait.”

  “Do we take them before or after their big imported kosher banquet?” asked Tony.

  “Before, on their way into the restaurant. We don’t need to be waiting around for a couple of hours with guns in our pockets. Besides,” Hatfield continued in a grim voice, “I don’t want one single sixty thousand-dollar kosher morsel flown in all the way from Jerusalem to go down those kikes’ gullets. I want that vile slap in the face to my people to sit there on the table getting cold and gooey while the roses fade and the petals fall to the floor. Call it a symbolic act. The Goldmans’ day is done, is every sense of the term.”

  “Lieutenant, you have the soul of a poet!” laughed Lee. “What if there are people around who might see the whole thing?”

  “Then they see the whole thing,” said Zack with a shrug. “We’ll be masked and I will screw out the night bulb on the Yukon’s rear plates so it will be hard to read in the dark. It will most likely be raining, anyway, this being February. Or at least cloudy and very dark. The one thing I don’t like about this is there’s only one way on and off that platform, over the pier. I am assuming Goldman will be driving his Lincoln Town Car, right?”

  “He might take the SUV to a Valentine’s dinner, but most likely not, for romantic reasons,” said Washburn.

  “Okay, when they reach the restaurant, you guys pull over on 39th Street and wait. Cover the exit ramp on the pier on the wild off chance that something goes wrong, and either they make a break for it or else we get into trouble and need help. When Tony and I see Goldman’s Jew canoe come across the pier and into the parking lot, we pull out in the Yukon, right up to the edge of the pier so we’re ready to roll,” said Zack. “We leave the engine running. We get out of the vehicle, closing but n
ot slamming the doors, doing nothing to alarm them. We intercept the targets on their way inside, when they clear the parked cars so they can’t duck down and cover behind anything. We shoot them both, triple tap, first bullet dead center to put them down and two more into the head to complete the execution. We walk at a quick pace, but do not run, back to the Yukon and we drive at a normal speed off the pier, and then we rendezvous at Shangri-La.” Shangri-La was a code name for a vacation-rental RV on a scenic bluff overlooking the river in the nearby crossroads village of Knappa, which Len had been given the keys to in order to install a new water tank and which keys he had copied.

  “Sounds simple enough,” said Len.

  “Yah, but the simplest plan can go haywire because of the smallest missed detail or unexpected occurrence,” said Hatfield. “We need to get into the habit of going over these things two dozen times, extrapolating anything that might cause a hitch or go wrong.”

  “One question,” asked Ekstrom. “Have you thought anymore about booby-trapping the Goldmans’ Lincoln after you send them off to the great Catskills resort in the sky? You remember we’re supposed to booby-trap everything we can. I can give you a PVC pipe bomb with six sticks of dynamite. PVC is light and won’t fall off, with a pull-tab detonator and a goop strip you can use to stick it onto the underside on the driver’s side. You use a small magnet to stick the other end of the detonator cord onto the door, and when someone opens the door it will pull the lead foil tab from between the battery contacts, and ka-blooey!”