The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “It’s all Portland police,” said Bresler suddenly. “No FBI, no BATFE, no Homeland Security. How did the Portland flatfeet get to be such ace terrorist-fighters all of a sudden?”

  “That’s one suspicious aspect, yes,” concurred Hill. “Number six is the worst incident of the lot. On Christmas Eve, Volunteers Lex Vannaway and Dutch Cripe are trapped by an RRT team in the downtown Denny’s and are shot and killed, along with a waitress and several other diners wounded in the ensuing firefight. The Portland PB spokesperson praises the brave officers of RRT, who actually crashed an armored assault vehicle through the front window of the restaurant so they wouldn’t have to fire at our men without cover. The cops claim that Cripe and Vannaway were recognized on a closed-circuit TV monitor by computerized facial profiling.”

  “So maybe they were?” suggested Bresler.

  “Maybe,” conceded Hill. “Incident number seven, January 7th. Second Battalion XO Peanuts Panczko is arrested at a shopping mall in Gresham. Portland PB claims the mall security guard’s sniffer dog picked up gun oil and powder residue on him. We lost a good man, there. One of our guys in the Justice Center was able to get a message out, and he says Panczko may be dead. They heard him being tortured for several nights running, but no one has seen him since.”

  “Mother of God!” moaned Bresler. “I didn’t know Peanuts long, but he was a funny guy. I liked him.” He poured out cups of coffee and handed Hill one.

  “Let’s not give up on him until we have confirmation,” said Hill with a sigh. “Incident number eight. February 3rd. Twenty-six rifles, assorted other arms and ammo, one of Portland’s only two M-60 machine guns, and our one remaining RPG launcher scooped up from an arms dump in the Blue Skies Motel in Aloha. The manager was an NVA asset attached to A Company Second Batt, but he managed to E & E okay and he’s now gone to full active service status with Billy. Portland PB says an alert Mexican chambermaid spotted the guns. These cop stories are getting pretty thin by this time. We know there weren’t any Mexicans working there; our guy employed only Russian and Serb and white American girls, and the room in question was locked up and never cleaned. So we know they’re bullshitting on that one.”

  “This isn’t looking good,” admitted Bresler sadly.

  Hill scowled. “It looks even worse on incident number nine, February 8th. Volunteer Bert Nordfeldt was surrounded and arrested by a Portland plainclothes squad in the Sheraton hotel restaurant downtown. He had to go in light for a meeting, because of the metal detectors, so he didn’t even have a gun on him. The woman he was supposed to meet saw the bust go down from the lobby. She followed procedure, yelled spaghetti and beat feet to her E & E point. She’s been debriefed and everything she says holds water. I’m sure she’s clean. In an amazing reversal of their whole policy ever since 10/22 in Coeur d’Alene, Nordfeldt is put into a regular police cell and he is allowed a court-appointed lawyer, some smarmy character from legal aid named Van Meek, who has a reputation as a scumbag even by lawyer standards. Van Meek can’t get anything out of our guy except the Five Words, of course, but that doesn’t matter, since he’s doing all the talking. He tells Nordfeldt that he was recognized from Oregon’s Most Wanted’s Weekly Spotlight on Terrorism by a waiter in the restaurant named Alvin Johnson, a young white kid, college student.”

  “The Portland cops supposedly burned their own informant to the suspect?” snorted Bresler. “If you believe that, I have this bridge in Brooklyn I can let you have cheap!”

  “Well, granted, that happens sometimes. Police and legal aid lawyers aren’t exactly the sharpest knives in ZOG’s drawer. But then, without being asked, this Van Meek scuzzball goes and sees Nordfeldt’s mother and his brother and his girlfriend, all of whom were also pulled in and interrogated, but then released. He tells them the same story about the waiter kid. Naturally Johnson’s name gets back to us, almost as if it was intended to. I go looking, very carefully because by now I’m smelling a rat.”

  “What did the Johnson kid have to say?” asked Bresler.

  “Nothing. He’s disappeared.”

  “So he took his 50 grand blood money and then he took off for parts unknown?” suggested Bresler.

  “Maybe,” said Hill. “Trouble is, I was able to ease my body into the kitchen at the Sheraton, into the manager’s office, and get a look at Johnson’s time card. He wasn’t punched in on the night of February 8th. He wasn’t even working the day Nordfeldt was pinched.”

  “Sounds like you need to have a little talk with jurisconsult Van Meek,” said Bresler.

  “We did,” said Hill. “We detained him last night, in fact. Since he’s a lawyer I actually read him the FBI’s Dershowitz Protocols from my own copy while a colleague of mine was laying out the needles. Just to let him know it was all legal and above board. We never even touched him. By the middle of page two he was screaming for mercy. He admitted that the Portland cops put him up to it.”

  “Portland PB? Not FBI or DHS?” asked Bresler keenly.

  “Portland PB. Two detectives first grade, very nasty mooks from the old pre-10/22 Hatecrime Squad, a brown Barbie Doll named Elena Martinez and her partner, a big badass nigger named Jamal Jarvis, aka the Mami and the Monkey.”

  “I’m familiar with their names, and I’ve seen some photos,” said Bresler. “They’ve been on the hit parade almost since 10/22, but we can’t seem to catch up with them.”

  Hill nodded. “Yeah, we’ve even sent Cat-Eyes Lockhart out hunting them a couple of times on tip-offs, but no luck. Jarvis and Martinez are cagey and they’re smooth. They know damned well the Party remembers them from the bad old days, and they’re both on the spot marked X. They’ve moved out of their old digs and they’re living somewhere under cover now, they keep their heads down and they move off the radar, which fits in with what we hear about them now doing covert DT work for the Portland department. Their names have cropped up in other contexts. Everybody in the department down to the janitor down at the Justice Center knows there’s something going on with those two, but no one knows what. Now Van Meek says they’re the ones who gave him this Alvin Johnson red herring. He swore he didn’t know anymore about it, and I believe him. He just did as he was paid to do. He has no idea where the waiter is. I hate to say it, but I think that poor Johnson kid was just an expendable white boy and ZOG has vaporized him to keep up the masquerade and protect their rat.”

  “I suppose the legal beagle is buried in a landfill now?” asked Bresler carelessly.

  “No, I let him go,” said Hill.

  “Uh, was that a good idea?” inquired the XO.

  “Sorry as I was to turn a lawyer loose on society again, it was a calculated risk,” replied Hill. “Whatever the hell is rotten in the state of Denmark, I don’t want anyone downtown in police headquarters to know we’re onto it. If Van Meek disappeared, Martinez and Jarvis would know we’d rumbled them. We had Van Meek sweating like a pig, including his hands, and I made him get a good grip on an empty shotgun and a .38 pistol. I also made him read a couple of standard NVA online propaganda pieces and slogans into a digital recorder. I told him that if he mentioned one word to anyone about our little tête-a-tête, his voice would be on every illegal NVA internet site and the guns he’d handled would be found in close proximity to some dead bodies of Portland cops. The guy is a rodent, with a rodent’s instinct for self preservation, and he doesn’t want to see those Dershowitz needles laid out for him again in a secret Homeland Security cell somewhere. He’ll keep his mouth shut. I hope. So that’s our nine questionable cases. Do you see the main pattern yet, besides the fact that it all seems to be coming out of a suddenly amazingly efficient Portland Police Bureau?”

  “I’m not sure,” admitted Bresler.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen the media coverage, here and in other cities, when the FBI or Homeland Security or other cops arrest or kill our people, or raid our safe houses and confiscate weapons, or somehow interfere with or interdict our operations,” Hill explained patiently. “Every
time the feds pull something like that off, they go on CNN looking like the cat that got the cream and play their we-were-acting-on-our-sources number, highly classified, can’t comment, nudge-nudge wink-wink, you get the idea. They want to make us nervous and paranoid and reassure their own backers that they have this big web of informers in the NVA, which they don’t, or we’d all be dead or in prison. The few people feds have been able briefly to slip in on us have all been peripheral and were spotted and dealt with before they did too much damage. That’s the one big advantage of the ‘you don’t join the NVA, the NVA joins you’ rule. In order for them to get an infiltrator in deep it would almost certainly have to be one of our own people who went bad after he got in, acting out of a personal grudge or for money. So far, that hasn’t happened yet. Knock on wood.”

  “Not that you know of,” Bresler reminded him dryly.

  “True, not that we know of,” admitted Hill. “This kind of official deception is a standard, Centcom-imposed psychological warfare protocol for all federal agencies and local law enforcement, a procedure that all of a sudden the Portland cops are violating all over the place. In each of these nine episodes, they’ve gone out of their way to try and offer us some kind of plausible explanation as to how each one happened. Why are they doing that?”

  “Most likely, to try and distract us from the fact that that they now have a real informer,” said Jack with a heavy sigh.

  “And now for the kicker,” said Hill. “You heard about that mess we had the other night over in McMinnville?”

  “Yeah, I heard the cops had a shoot-out with some cholos and Red Morehouse and Tommy Coyle both had front row seats,” said Bresler. “What the hell was that all about? The media said it was just some gang-bangers who’d been out cruising and doing bad acts. You’re saying it wasn’t a coincidence?”

  “The gang-bangers were authentic, all right,” Hill told him. “I’ve looked that over six ways to Sunday, and the actual firefight itself seems to be just what the media says it was. A carload of low-riders knocked over a liquor store, the driver was so drunk or stoned he rammed a cop car, and all hell busted lose. The cops shot two of the cholos, and the other two are in custody and getting their full legal due process, like white men never get anymore. I’m kind of inclined to put that down to one more instance of that odd divine intervention that seems to step in now and then to help us out since the white man started standing up and fighting. Fortune favors the brave, and all that. That diversion may have saved us from something worse.”

  “So, what were we doing out there?”

  “The Wild West show took place right in front of a storefront in which the NVA was conducting a special command conference,” said Hill. “We were being briefed on a new plan ZOG has come up with. They’re organizing some kind of special brute squad to invade the Northwest and deal with us hatemongers, Federal Domestic Terrorist Police or something like that. Apparently it will be kind of like the Black and Tans in Ireland a century ago. It’s still in the planning stage, but Mr. Chips was bringing us the word from the Army Council to start preparing tactical and strategic plans to deal with a big increase in fed boots on the street and a lot tougher tactics. I myself was there from Threesec acting for Colonel Redmond, and Tommy Coyle and Harry Hannon both there to brainstorm.”

  “You had both brigade commandants and an Army Council member there in the same room?” demanded Bresler. “Jeez Louise, that was risky!”

  “I know, but sometimes we just have to put our heads together and work out a tough problem, and this was one of those times. The meeting never actually got started because Harry hadn’t arrived yet, and wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes, when all of a sudden we hear gunfire out in the street. We scoped pretty quick that it seemed to be a Mexican beef with the cops, but we flashed spaghetti to Harry and beat feet anyway. We left Volunteer Ron Kolchak behind as rear guard to cover us from the roof. You know Ron?”

  “Sure I do,” said Bresler with a nod. “Good man. Probably the best sniper we’ve got after Cat-Eyes Lockhart.”

  “Okay, we all exited the building from the rear, weapons ready, didn’t run into any trouble, we made it to our vehicles okay and un-assed the area. Ron stayed behind for about five minutes covering down, then he went out himself over the roof. No problem. But when he reported back to the safe house he had an interesting story to tell.” Hill leaned forward. “Kolchak was packing an M-24 rifle with an infrared night scope. Between that and the streetlights he had clear vision for several blocks. Halfway down the next block, parked on the street, was an Oak Harbor Van Lines panel truck. It had been there ever since we arrived, didn’t seem to be occupied, and when our scout car drove by there they didn’t see any activity. Now, you have to bear in mind that there was a gun battle going on in the street right below him, and there were sirens everywhere and more cop cars coming. In fact, I think Volunteer Kolchak deserves a commendation for the grit he showed in staying as long as he did. But he sees a couple of the incoming cop cars pull up by this parked panel truck. Ron sights down on it with his scope, and he sees the back roll up and five or six people jump out onto the street and start running toward the intersection where the shooting and the yelling and the Spanish profanity was going on. Some of the guys from the truck are carrying long arms, M-16s and shotguns, and they’re wearing baseball caps and blue jackets that Ron says he is sure were Portland PB issue. They’re led by a man and a woman in plain clothes. This group gets to the corner, followed by some regular cops who pile out of their squad cars with their weapons out. They stop, they mill around like they’re confused for twenty seconds or so, and then one of the plainclothes cops, the female, waves the uniforms toward the incident with the Mexican stickup men in the intersection, while the party from the panel truck runs back to it, gets in and rolls down the door, the two dicks get into another parked car down the street and they all drive off. All of this takes place in a period of maybe sixty seconds, while all the ruckus is going on down below in the street.”

  “Oooo-kaaay,” said Bresler slowly. “So there was some kind of plainclothes stakeout near the meeting site?”

  “Apparently. Now get this: Kolchak swears on a stack of Mein Kampfs that the two plainclothes cops he saw in the lead were Lainie Martinez and Jamal Jarvis. He says Jarvis now has a shaved head, and he’s wearing one of those Lion of Judah goatee beards, but it was definitely the two of them.”

  “Ron would know them?” asked Bresler.

  “Affirmative,” replied Hill. “He’s not only seen our photos, he knows both of them from his days in the pre-10/22 Party when Lainie and Jamal used to haul him in and beat him bloody every now and then, just for shits and giggles. He said he wanted to take a shot for auld lang syne, real bad, but he forced himself to keep a cool head and think. He was surrounded and outnumbered, they didn’t know he was there and he wasn’t sure he could beat feet once they spotted him, he didn’t know whether or not our officers had gotten clear yet, and furthermore it appeared to him as if the enemy themselves were confused and caught off guard. If they didn’t know what the hell was going on, Kolchak didn’t feel it was his place to enlighten them. I concur with that decision.”

  “So do I,” agreed Bresler. “Like Patton said, nobody ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. Our guys need to live to fight another day. So what the hell were those two doing skulking in a panel truck a block and a half from where an Army Council member and two brigadiers were about to huddle?”

  “That’s what we have to find out,” said Hill. “I have to admit, Jack, that McMinnville affair is what throws me. There were only eight or nine very senior people in the whole Army who knew that such a meeting was going to take place at all. I had Tommy prepare a list of five possible venues, with me only picking McMinnville an hour before. Harry and Tommy themselves didn’t know when or where until an hour or so before the meet. They were just told to stand by and be available at any moment for
a priority order. Billy Jackson and Jimmy Wingo were on roving patrol outside in two vehicles, and each of them had one of their gun bunnies driving. They also did the preliminary security sweep of the meeting site, no bugs detected, but they didn’t actually know what was going on inside the building or who would be there. I would have sworn that one was buttoned up tight!”

  “A panel truck sounds like bugging equipment, though,” said Bresler. “They might have had shotgun mikes or some of that weird microwave satellite gear. Did you sweep everybody who came in?”

  “Yes, Red came down with those two kids from Dundee he uses a lot, Shane and Rooney, and Tommy had a couple of guys with him. I did them all myself as they came in the door, and nothing popped. I know, they can listen in on people in a basement now from satellites in space these days. They have fiber-optic micro-bugs that are the size of a pinhead, bugs that look like cockroaches and even scuttle across the floor, you name it. The old-fashioned wire stuck on some guy’s shaven belly with surgical tape is as outdated as the flintlock. Whatever it was, I can tell you that they didn’t seem prepared to move on us. It looks to me like some kind of observation stakeout. But how the hell did they know where to listen in?” Hill slammed his fist into his palm in frustration.

  “So what do we do now?” asked Bresler.

  “We take every one of those incidents and we review and analyze the hell out of them,” said Hill. “We make a list of names for each red flag. Who knew about those safe houses and arms dumps? Who has had any contact with any of the Volunteers who went down, close enough to be able to predict their movements and finger them? Who knew what and when did they know it? Then we take the list for each incident and look for matches. There are bound to be some. Then we take all our matches and try to fit them in with the other incidents, even if it appears there’s no connection. Comrade X knew about Steve Bright, but did he or she know about the EOD machine shop? Did he or she know someone who knew about the McMinnville meeting site? Comrade Y knew Peanuts Panczko, but did he or she know about Roger West, or could they have found out? Once we’ve narrowed it down to a few suspects, then it gets tricky, because we will have to devise some bogus setups to entrap them and see if we can make some Portland cops show up on cue at a certain place and time. These are the kinds of things that you will have to find out, Gary, because I can’t without tipping everybody in the Battalion that there’s a rat around, and you know that whatever else happens, we do not want that to get about. Our morale is high, largely because so far we have been able largely to prevent infiltration of this very kind. Rampaging paranoia and mistrust can destroy the Second Battalion as a fighting unit just as effectively as any mass arrest. It can even seep out of the Second Battalion and infect other units, and we have to prevent that at all costs. This has to be handled quietly, efficiently, and above all quickly, before anyone else dies or ends up in the Justice Center torture chambers.”