The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  Wingo went into the living room where Kicky sat on the couch, her arm bandaged, staring at the twentieth replay of the gun battle on Flanders Street on the television screen. She shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe I did that,” she said to Jimmy. “I don’t even remember doing it.”

  “You are the daughter of heroes,” said Jimmy. “You just needed a little reminding, and you answered the call. The Commandant is here, and he wants to speak with you.”

  The big block-like figure of Coyle entered the room. Kicky had never seen him before, and she struggled to get to her feet with one arm. “No, please don’t get up, comrade,” Coyle said in a gentle voice. “I understand that it’s thanks to you that we’re not burying any of our own today. Please accept my congratulations and my admiration for a brave and effective action, all of you. It wasn’t quite the splash we had hoped for, true, but the Vice President canceled his visit and ran back to Washington D.C. with his tail tucked between his legs, and you guys racked up an impressive body count, including a couple of senior FBI agents and the Chief of Police herself. Not to mention your photogenic little piece of street theater there.” He nodded to the TV. “Damned good propaganda. Well done, all of you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Kicky, still trying to accustom herself to the fact that for the first time she could speak to these men without being overheard by their enemies, that she was clean in every sense of the word.

  “May I ask how you spotted the police ambush?” inquired the Commandant.

  “Well, I knew that cop,” said Kicky carefully. “His name is—was, McCafferty. He was a detective. I used to, uh, have a lot of run-ins with the cops, and I did some time in prison.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know,” said Coyle, politely refraining from mentioning just how much he knew, although Kicky was sure he knew everything.

  “He was one of the bastards who sent me to Coffee Creek because of Lenny Gillis’ fencing stolen stuff,” said Kicky, knowing that with McCafferty dead her story would be difficult to confirm or deny. “Not the main one, but I knew him from when I was arrested that time. I saw him as we were driving down Flanders Street and he pulled a radio out of his pocket, and I—well, I can’t really explain this, sir, but I just knew. That’s all I can tell you. I just knew.”

  “Ma’am, I spent a lot of time in Iraq, too much time,” said Coyle with a sigh. “So did Comrade Lockhart here. Some of us got to the point where we could smell the hadjis when they were around. It’s a necessary combat survival instinct. Believe me, I understand.”

  “I just did the first thing that came to my mind,” she ended lamely. “I ran his ass down.”

  Coyle held out his hand and shook Kicky’s good hand. “We don’t have any medals yet to give comrades like you, Volunteer McGee, so all I can do is say thank you. Someday a grateful free white nation will offer you more. We’ll let you get some rest now.” The men left her, but before he went out of the room Jimmy Wingo leaned over and kissed her gently on the lips.

  When they had gone, she stared into the silently flickering television. Finally the vision of her daughter, that she could suppress no longer rose before her eyes. Kicky wondered if Ellie would ever see the film of that morning on Flanders Street, if she would ever know the identity of the bloody woman firing the pistol, and if that would be her lifelong image of her mother.

  She closed her tear-filled eyes. Goodbye, my little one, she thought, suffering in terrible silence. You are young, and you will forget me, but never will I forget you. Whatever new life they give you, be well. Be happy. Try to forgive me some day. Goodbye, my darling child.

  XVI

  Things That Go Boom In The Night

  Things without all remedy

  Should be without regard.

  What’s done is done.

  Macbeth—Act III, Scene 2

  Zack Hatfield got his wish; Kicky McGee was assigned to Third Battalion at least temporarily, since it was felt to be a good idea to get her, Cat Lockhart, and Jimmy Wingo out of Portland for a while. She got to see a lot of the wild countryside up and down the North Coast, which was a new experience for a city girl like her, and to her surprise she began to feel a long dormant connection with nature and the outdoors that she had never experienced before. She made up her mind that if somehow the nightmare ever resolved itself and she was ever again free to do what she wanted, she would leave Portland, and come here to the rockbound coast and the deep, dark forests that rose above the sea.

  Lockhart was sent on what amounted to a road tour. The NVA moved him into areas as far north as Bellingham, Washington, as far east as Montana, and on one occasion he did a memorable gig in Vancouver, British Columbia that gained him the signal honor of being declared Canada’s Most Wanted Fugitive by the RCMP and having a special writ of outlawry passed against him by the Parliament in Ottawa, an archaic legal device that allowed anyone, police officer or otherwise, to shoot him on sight. Such an outlawry act had last been used in the Nineteenth Century, against the Indian metis rebels of Louis Riel. Wingo served as Lockhart’s backup, and on his last tour in June, Kicky went with the pair of them. She drove, stood lookout, and otherwise assisted the famed marksman, along with relays of local Volunteers in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.

  During this time Kicky and Jimmy Wingo became lovers, which in the NVA context meant sandwiching occasional sex into the daily roller coaster ride of life on the bounce. It was a natural development and helped her with her transition into her new life. Kicky forced herself to carry out a tremendous act of mental and emotional self discipline, dividing her life into two sections or compartments, Before and After Flanders Street. She never allowed these compartments to overlap in her consciousness, at least not when she could prevent it. Before Flanders Street was before. That was not the person she was today. Now was after, and she was someone else. Memories of Ellie she suppressed with swift brutality every time they surfaced. She knew perfectly well in the back of her mind that this was delusional, that there was still a very good chance that her role as a police informant would somehow come out, and that she would have to die for what she had done. She simply accepted this risk along with the same death she risked every day. In a fractured mutation from one of her old twelve-step programs when she had been trying to quit drugs, she schooled herself to live one day at a time, and she simply didn’t think about the future. She became fatalistic, and accepted her destiny philosophically. Her life was now set on its permanent track, and she would see how it played out.

  By mid-summer, Kicky and Jimmy Wingo were back in Portland, although Kicky’s hair was now trimmed in bangs and dyed auburn. They were now a recognized couple, and the Army’s policy was to keep such couples together wherever possible and allow them to work as a team. The Battle of Flanders Street was a memory, there were other and more recent bloody media events and debacles for the government and police, and they were now as safe in Portland as anywhere else. Kicky had no idea how Lainie Martinez and Jamal Jarvis had dealt with her sudden and dramatic defection. All she knew was that there had been no public announcement from the Portland Police Bureau about her or indeed the presence of any informant on Flanders Street. The whole thing had been played by the media as a heroic mission led in person by Chief Linda Hirsch to save the life of the Vice President of the United States. Kicky did hear that all the police involved in the shoot-out had received commendations and that Martinez and Jarvis had received Medals of Valor, as well as Hirsch and McCafferty, the latter two posthumously, of course. Beyond that she knew nothing of what the Portland cops were up to regarding her. Nor did she know that Oscar and Gary Bresler were still hunting her relentlessly.

  One summer’s evening Kicky took part in a special training session with Volunteers Jason Carmody, Eric Sellars, and Annette Ridgeway, a session that was in fact part of that Third Section mole hunt. They were taken to a warehouse unit in Beaverton for a lecture and hands-on instruction from Second Battalion explosives officer Lieutenant Vincent Pascarella. Eric
looked over and saw four low racks of metal shelving about ten feet long laid about two feet apart so they served as sawhorses. Across the tops of the shelving units lay two heavy black cylinders about four feet long, made of what looked like corrugated steel pipe with odd brackets and wires sticking out of the lower end, and four or five longer, more slender tubes that appeared to be made of stainless steel, with blunted noses almost like torpedoes and triangular airfoils or wings about halfway down and again at the perforated base. By now Eric was out of the habit of asking questions, but Pascarella saw them all looking at the objects and volunteered an explanation. “Chug-chugs and whizz-bangs,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought, sir, but which is which?” asked Eric. “I’ve never seen any of these before.”

  “The chug-chugs are the home-made mortars,” said Pascarella, pointing at the black cylinders. “We made them 81-millimeter for consistency’s sake, so we can use certain factory accessories like a bipod assembly with them and mount them on an M252 base plate if we ever get hold of one, but I wouldn’t dare try to fire one of those with a proper military round in it. They’d blow up in our faces.”

  “I know the rockets are called whizz-bangs because of the sound they make,” said Annette. “Well, according to CNN.”

  “That’s pretty much it, yeah,” agreed Vince. “They use a solid fuel propellant made by our Popular Science club that doesn’t like to stay solid. The techs are still diddling with it, trying to stabilize it. We use these to loft a love tap or two over Uncle Slime’s Bremer walls every now and then. I keep hoping we’ll hit the executive john and blow some federal judge off the crapper, but so far the results have been mixed, to put it charitably. They’re kind of like the Zeppelins in World War One. Good psychological weapons, and they can sure give some government clerk or secretary the heebie-jeebies about coming to work, but the problem is you can’t hit the broad side of a barn with the damned things, and on entirely too many occasions the payload doesn’t even detonate. Plus you have to find a place to set up, and you need at least a three-man crew to fire them, and then we generally end up with an E&E chase sequence. The risks are high and the results problematical. We have been able to force the feds to evacuate a lot of their high-rise buildings, because even these clumsy bozos can slam into a skyscraper window, but all they’ve done is cordon off surrounding streets and set up their offices and gear in trailers down below the level of the Bremer walls. I keep hearing scuttlebutt that Quartermaster GHQ is trying to cop us some serious hardware from assorted international arms dealers, or else direct from Ivan the Bear himself, and we have a standing offer of $50,000 to any American military personnel who can make an M252 and a couple of dozen HE rounds fall off the back of a truck, but no luck so far.”

  “Uh, what exactly is a Bremer wall, Lieutenant?” asked Eric.

  “Yeah, you’re what, seventeen, eighteen? That one’s from a bit before your time, I guess. Bremer walls are those big steel-reinforced concrete blocks with the sloping bases and topped with razor wire that the feds lift into place on cranes and use to surround their Green Zones, in the Middle East and now in the Northwest Homeland,” Pascarella told him. “Named after Paul Bremer, the first American imperial viceroy in Iraq. Bremer was the ultimate FOBBIT, meaning he stayed in his burrow. Reportedly he never once left a Green Zone or other secured and air-conditioned area during his entire stay in Iraq. He gave his name to those concrete chunks that are now associated with the American empire, just like roads and viaducts are associated with Rome, and tea and cricket are still the rage in former British colonial possessions. Bremer walls are one of the reasons we need to use mortars or rockets as an explosive delivery vector, to try and get through them or over them, since we don’t use suicide bombers. You guys pull up those chairs and listen up.” The four young Volunteers did so.

  “Okay, this and a few more sessions are going to constitute your cross-training in explosives,” Pascarella told them. “You’ll be told and shown what you may need to know as Volunteers in your line companies, and if you ever decide to go EOD you’ll get some more intensive instruction. We won’t be doing anything practical in here tonight, but some time over the next month or so, we will arrange a little trip for all of you down the mighty Columbia along Highway 30. There you will meet some comrades from Cap Hatfield’s Wild Bunch, aka Third Battalion, whom Comrade Jodie here is already acquainted with. The Boys down there pretty much have the run of the woods, and they’ll take you on a little camping trip out in the wilds of the Northwest forests where you will learn all kinds of things you never learned in Diversity 101 and multicultural sensitivity training in school. But tonight I’ll give you the theory. I’ll tell you why the NVA uses explosives, under what tactical circumstances, and how we go about it.”

  Pascarella sat down on one of the low steel shelving units. “Okay, first off, let me tell you what the NVA does not do with explosives. We are not deranged Muslim fanatics who load up a vehicle with anything we can find that will detonate, and then drive up to some crowded public place and blow ourselves and a hundred others sky high. There are no suicide bombers in the NVA and never will be. We want you all to live, and after this is all over help build the Republic you’re risking your lives for now. Nor are we dotty Provisional IRA from Belfast who blow up things just to hear the pretty bang, and who don’t give a shit if they kill a busload of school kids or a family of tourists or some little old lady in a wheel chair in the process.

  “The Northwest Volunteer Army never uses explosives purely as an anti-personnel weapon, for General Order Number Four enforcement against non-Whites who are illegally in the Republic or anything like that, except when we can get hand grenades and carefully target them in nigger juke joints or crack houses or Mexican cantinas, that kind of thing. But never actual bombs. There is simply too much chance of bad blowback in every sense of the word, too much chance that something could go wrong and we might kill or injure the very people we’re fighting for. The potential for collateral damage through the poorly judged use of explosives is catastrophic, casualty-wise, politically, and propaganda-wise. When the time comes and you’re planning your own tickles, never try to do with a bomb what can be accomplished with a gun. If you’re after an economic or strategic target, always try to use arson instead of explosives if at all possible. You can take out the target just as effectively with a torch job, and any non-combatants in the area usually have more of a chance to get out and survive. So far the NVA has been lucky. There have been a few bad accidents, and after the war we’re going to be paying some lifelong compensation to families, if they’ll accept it from us. But at least we haven’t had any horrors like some little toddler and her baby brother in a stroller being blown to smithereens or anything like that. Not yet, anyway, and hopefully we won’t ever have anything like that, knock wood.”

  “Sir, what if the feds try some kind of fake NVA bombing and they deliberately murder a bunch of white children to make us look bad?” asked Eric.

  “The thought has occurred to us, yes. That’s called a black op, Volunteer, and you’re right, these bastards in the United States government are perfectly capable of murderous treacherous crap like that,” agreed Pascarella grimly. “I or any veteran who served in Iraq can tell you that. You guys who remember watching the news back then, did you ever wonder why the Iraqis and later on Iranians and Saudis and Egyptians seemed to just go around blowing each other up indiscriminately with no rhyme or reason? Well, put it this way—a lot of those car bombs had ‘made in USA’ stamped all over them, or in some cases ‘made in Israel.’ I ought to know. I packed a few for those CIA and Mossad dogs myself, I am ashamed to say.

  “Now, getting back to your question, troop, while I am not an intelligence or a political officer and you know the strong Army rule against spreading rumors, my understanding is that in one of the few bits of unofficial negotiation we have ever done with the other side, the NVA made it clear to the federal government of the United States that if any explo
sions went off in kindergartens or hospitals or nursing homes, and the media tried to claim that us evil white racists did it, then our moratorium on attacking commercial passenger liners, airports, and air traffic in the United States would end and we would start taking out jet liners, on the runways and in the air. We have the power to shut down air travel within the United States and in and out of the United States, guys, and you may wonder why we’ve never used it. That’s why. So far the unwritten agreement of no CIA-style black ops, in exchange for no attacks on the airlines and airports, has held. No President of the United States in her right mind wants to shut down all air traffic in this country. Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

  “The NVA uses explosives in three basic situations. First off, when there is an economic or strategic or propaganda-related target that has to be physically destroyed, sometimes loudly and visibly in order to set an example. This might be a factory or business that is owned by Jews, or that won’t stop employing Third World illegals, or a business of some kind that is supplying goods or services to the enemy. It might be a bar or restaurant that refuses to ban military personnel or federal employees or non-whites. It might be an office building or other structure used by our assorted enemies, and we need to deny it to them and destroy their plant. You get the idea. The second instance in which we use bombing is against enemy armor and fortifications, like when we toss these primitive rockets and mortar shells here over the Bremer walls and razor wire and give Daddy a kiss. This is where the good old IED or Improvised Explosive Device, otherwise known as the Baghdad Banger, comes into its own. Like some other NVA guys who are vets, I have the unusual experience of having been on both ends of an IED, and between the Muslims and ourselves, we have refined them down to an art form. Through the use of IEDs we make enemy troop movements dangerous and difficult to plan and execute, and in some areas of the Northwest, we have succeeded in more or less driving the police and the military off the highways completely, forcing them to fall back on helicopters. If we ever succeed in obtaining any shoulder-fired missiles or some other way to bring those birds down, Uncle Slime is going to be really fucked. I imagine that some of you guys are already familiar with the third way in which the NVA uses explosives. Anyone?”