The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Mmmm . . . I wouldn’t be broadcasting that about,” said Post carefully. “You’re lucky. I’m something of an ethical mercenary, and when I’m paid I stay bought. But there are those who would shop you to the Fatties in a heartbeat if they found out something like that about you. There is a lot of reward money on the hoof moving around the Northwest these days, ma’am. Every mother’s son and daughter of the NVA has a basic $50,000 DT on his or her head, that’s domestic terrorist bounty, and from there it goes up depending on how naughty the individual Volunteer has been. I think Hatfield’s up to over half a million now. In addition to all the other gun-toting loons we have up here now, we got bounty hunters and free-lance snitches under every rock.”

  “These people have women members?” asked Julia in surprise. “Wait, what am I talking about? That’s a stupid thing for me to say. I knew one of them myself. Erica Collingwood.”

  “Yeah, they got women. They call ’em gun bunnies. Some of ’em real hotties, no offense,” chuckled Post. “Erica, and Melanie Young with the Olympic Flying Column, and that tattooed biker chick who shot up Flanders Street and killed the police chief along with Cat-Eyes Lockhart and those other gnarly dudes. Anyway, to answer your question, I wouldn’t be much of a native guide if I didn’t know all the tribes and customs along the way. I’ll make some calls, very carefully of course, and I’ll see what I can do to speed things along and find Cap for you.” He pulled the Jeep into a small boat dock by the river.

  “Where are we going?” asked Julia in surprise.

  “Astoria, the same way Lewis and Clark got there,” said Post. He pulled up to a slip containing a motorboat about twenty-five feet in length named the Nemo. “What can I say? Movies are everywhere, and my kids love that one. We’ll be heading down along the river. Lucky for you it’s June and the sun doesn’t set until almost ten, so it should be still light when we pull into the Astoria dock.”

  The trip was magnificent, down the mighty Columbia River under a high summer sun. Julia spent the entire voyage sitting in a lawn chair on the deck, accepting Post’s offer of a late lunch of homemade ham and Swiss sandwiches on rye from plastic baggies, and multiple bottles of Henry Weinhard beer from a cooler. She had never made the trip on the water before, and she found herself stunned and awed by the incredible beauty of own her own native land. Both the Oregon and Washington banks were sun-dappled and glowing in brown and evergreen, and sea lions barked on the shore. The smokestacks of Longview still spewed their white fumes into the air, and great container ships still plied the waterway up and down to and from Longview and Portland. Other than the occasional police boat along the way there seemed to be no sign that there was an insurgency going on. As they sailed beneath the great bridge at Longview Julia went up to join Post on the bridge. “I know this sounds stupid, but you’d think if the NVA was trying to overthrow the government and wreck everything, they would have blown up this bridge, and the big 101 bridge down in Astoria,” she said. “I thought proper guerrillas were supposed to blow up bridges?”

  “Then how would they get across the river? Swim?” responded Post with a chuckle. “Besides, guerrillas don’t get very far if they totally ruin the lives of the local people they rely on for support. The local fuzz reached a modus vivendi with Jerry Reb on the bridges. The cops don’t put any checkpoints or cameras on either side of the bridges, and the NVA let the bridges stay up. Some of the state police and federals didn’t get the message during the first year or so and tried checkpoints, here in Longview and Astoria. The Wild Bunch simply shot the checkpoints on the Oregon side all to hell, and their colleagues in Cowlitz and Pacific counties shot them to hell on the Washington side. After half a dozen dead state troopers and FBI, the law realized they were just providing the NVA with targets and losing men for nothing, and so they pulled in their horns. Same thing with all these container vessels. The NVA could choke off the Columbia River maritime industry any time they want. They could just get up on that bridge at Astoria and drop a bomb on some Chinese freighter. They might sink it in mid-channel and block off the whole river. Even if they didn’t, they would effectively bottle everything up, because most captains and crews don’t really fancy a 100-mile voyage along a river where you’re mostly within small arms or at least rocket range of one shore or other, and somebody’s shooting at them. The Feds are probably pretty nervous that someday Jerry Reb will do just that, but the fact is that the U.S. military and cops are already stretched so thin that they simply can’t guard hundreds of miles of river bank and coast by placing troops every few yards, which is what they’d have to do. As bad as things are here, the overwhelming majority of America’s four million troops are still overseas trying to hold down six or seven countries in the Middle East at any given time. So the powers that be just leave it, and cross their fingers.”

  “Looks like they’ve gotten some extra manpower on the ground, from what I saw at the airport,” commented Julia.

  “Those are thugs, not soldiers,” Post reminded her. “They are not here to perform legitimate military tasks. They’re here to spread terror and intimidation and frighten white people into submission to the régime. But you’re right, at some point fairly soon, they’re going to have to try and move in downriver here, especially into Astoria. Astoria has become almost a kind of liberated zone, where white people can live safely and peacefully among their own kind. The United States can’t allow that.”

  “You sound like you sympathize with them,” said Julia. “Look, Wally, I’m grateful to you for the help. You’re right, I might be in trouble without it, and I don’t want to offend you or start an argument. But I have to remind you that these people are murderers. They’ve murdered some of my friends, including slaughtering some of them on live nationwide TV a few months ago at the Oscars.”

  “Well, I’m just a hired hand and I won’t get into a political discussion, ma’am,” said Post. “When you get into a war, one of the first things that becomes completely irrelevant is who started what. But you saw back at the airport how the United States government has responded. Let me ask you, ma’am, if destiny has decreed that the old Brady Bunch life is gone forever, as I think it has, and you had to deal with armed men in the dark of night on some street or some stretch of highway, who would you rather run into? That monkoid and his beaner buddy back at the airport? Or Zack Hatfield?”

  “I don’t know,” said Julia, shaking her head. “I really don’t. I’d rather not have to choose.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Post gently. “Eventually, you may have to. You can be ruled by gunmen from a different race, or gunmen from your own. That’s a shitty deal, but it’s a lot older situation than our so-called democracy here. Insofar as we ever really had one, which was never very far.”

  * * *

  As Julia Lear was enjoying her cruise down the Columbia, back in Portland Lieutenant Billy Jackson of A Company, First Brigade, sat in the back room of an upscale tanning salon in a small strip mall just off Skyline Boulevard. The place was called The Children of the Sun, appropriately enough; so far no one in the United States government had been sufficiently erudite to spot the ancient name of the Aryan peoples of the earth. Jackson had just finished a conversation with a young white man of nondescript appearance, who slipped out the back when he was through saying what he had to say. Jackson looked at Gary Bresler with a grim face. The news had not been good. “I’ll contact the commandant and bring him up to speed,” said Bresler. “But we’ve got to have a quiet word of prayer with that newshound, no question. How do you want to handle it?”

  Jackson flipped open his phone and dialed a number. When his call was answered he said, “Hey, Tom boy! I just got into town and I was hoping to catch you. How about a late lunch? What’s the best steak house in Portland? Never mind, we’ll figure something out. I’m at the Pioneer Inn.” The Pioneer Inn was downtown and nowhere near Jackson’s location, but it was the code word for the tanning salon. “Can you break loose from whatever you’re doin
g? Great! Oh, and be sure to bring that friend of yours, Becky. Mom has heard a lot about her and she wants a full report.” He hung up and looked at Bresler. “We’re going to have to extract Zucchino and take him off somewhere for our little talk, and that means we’ve got to get him out of the hotel without attracting attention. We’re going to need a Lorelei on this one.”

  “Becky?” asked Bresler. “You think she’s up for it?”

  “I wouldn’t have called her in if I didn’t think she is,” said Jackson. “But we’ll find out soon enough.”

  Eric Sellars and Annette Ridgeway were seated together in a lecture hall on the Portland State University campus when Jackson’s call came in. Eric had his NVA special throwaway phone on vibrate, so it didn’t ring out loud and he was able to conduct a sotto voce conversation without anyone other than his immediate neighbors knowing he was on the phone, and without disturbing the desiccated professor who was droning on about the vital importance of the Native American tradition in American history.

  Eric’s grades had been good enough, and Annette’s father was rich enough, so that they both could have gone to any college or university in the country. It caused some surprise and a bit of consternation among their parents when both had insisted on remaining close to home and attending the distinctly second-string and highly politically correct PSU, but with a little blarney they had been able to put it across. Annette told her father she still wasn’t comfortable leaving her mother alone, which was a valid enough reason, since Lorraine was still shaky and still on way too much medication for either Annette’s liking or her father’s. She also pointed out that PSU did have one crackerjack asset, an executive MBA program that would look very good on her resumé. Eric told his father that PSU had all the requisite pre-engineering courses he would need before he went on to Stanford or MIT or some other science-heavy campus, and he was open about his desire not to be separated from Annette, which his dad fully understood.

  It was by now accepted that barring some unforeseen circumstances, at some point in the middle-term future the two would marry. Both families were grateful, since neither now had to worry about the great American nightmare of what sort of revolting specimen of humanoid creature their son or daughter would bring home one day. The young people had acceded to their parents’ request that they wait until after they both got their bachelors’ degrees, so on the home front everything was smooth sailing. Both sets of parents were intensely relieved that there were no signs of drug use, insanity, or dysfunctional neurosis in either Eric or Annette, and that both seemed to be serious and goal-oriented young adults. They assumed that when their kids were out at all kinds of strange hours they were shacking up somewhere, but in view of how much, much worse they knew it could have been, they counted their blessings and said nothing. Nor had Ray Ridgeway ever mentioned his missing .45 handgun.

  After some preliminary arguments, both families had decided that their children would do two years at PSU and get all their basic credits under their belts before transferring to a more high-caliber institution for their degree. They were not yet aware that the only two choices the pair would consider when the time came would be the University of Oregon at Eugene, which was prime for Eric with its strong research emphasis, or the University of Washington in Seattle which would be better for Annette’s business degree, and that the choice would be dictated by the lovers’ superiors in the NVA, based on where they could be the most use to the revolution.

  “The boss man wants us both at the Pioneer Inn ASAP,” Eric whispered to Annette.

  “Wait ten minutes until the bell rings and class is over,” Annette whispered back. “Remember, this bullshit is a PC required credit to make sure our skulls are properly filled with mush about Indians. If we walk out we might draw suspicion. Besides, I want to get on this asshole’s good side, so maybe we can set him up for a hit down the line. The United States Constitution was not based on the oral laws of the Iroquois Confederation, it was based on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England! Jesus, what fucking pig-ignorance! Where do they get this crap?”

  “Mostly they just make it up,” said Eric. “Who’s going to argue with them when contradicting a politically correct professor in class can get you five years in prison?”

  It took them almost an hour after they left the campus to get to Skyline Boulevard in Annette’s Lexus, because Eric carefully took a maze of back streets to avoid the new FATPO checkpoints that were springing up all over Portland like mushrooms. Finally they walked into The Children of the Sun. The muscular and well-tanned young beach boy type behind the counter looked up. “Can I help you? We’ve got an introductory discount. You guys do look a little pale.”

  “Yeah, I hear this is where some other pale people hang out,” said Eric. A yellow legal pad and a pen lay on the desk, and the young man looked Eric in the eye while he drew a line diagonally across the page.

  “Pale’s not too fashionable these days,” he said. “You’re a lot better off brown.”

  Eric glanced down at the paper and picked up the pen. “You look like you speak from experience.” He crossed the diagonal line with another, making a large X on the paper.

  “I bet you could even pass as a Mexican if you wanted,” said Annette, picking up the pen and adding in the four cross-arms to complete the Swastika.

  The young man smiled, tore the paper off the sheet, and fed it into a shredder underneath the counter. “I have, you know. Four years of Spanish in school actually turned out to be good for something.” He nodded to the rear. Annette and Eric walked down a corridor past cubicles of overweight yuppies of both genders broiling themselves on the tables and entered the back room. They found Jackson and Bresler waiting for them, sitting at a folding table.

  “Saw you come in on the monitor,” said Jackson. He pointed to two chairs, one with a can of diet soda and one with a mug of steaming tea. “Herbal, right? Not sure if that’s the kind you like.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Annette as she and Eric sat down.

  Jackson leaned forward. “Comrades, we have a problem and we need your help. Especially your help, Becky. You may be aware that Portland is full of media people, reporters and TV crews and anchorpersons and free-lancers and such reptilian beings from all over the world, come to cover our glorious democracy’s battle against the evil forces of terrorism and hate, all that crap. Ever since Fattie moved into town the government has adopted a policy of embedding them, as they call it. Same thing they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Same reason, make sure that they can’t get off the reservation and see and report on things they shouldn’t. This is especially important since Fattie is already doing a lot of things he shouldn’t, and ZOG doesn’t want the world to know about it. All media personnel now have to be registered with FATPO, and they are assigned so-called security escorts wherever they go. Everything that goes out is censored, or it’s supposed to be. The régime is trying to maintain a chokehold on public perception of The Trouble in the Northwest. Obviously, we need to break that chokehold.

  “But that’s big-picture stuff. Our problem is specific. In Portland the media have been assigned several large hotels, mostly downtown, where they are all billeted and where they do their drinking and schmoozing and war-story swapping and bed-hopping and other journalist stuff. In theory they’re not supposed to leave the premises without a security escort of some kind, FATPO or at least one of the so-called contractors. In practice that’s pretty porous, as you can imagine. One of the habitués of the Benson Hotel on South Broadway is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times named Dawson Zucchino. He’s new in town, and we don’t have any particular gripe with him. His articles are anti-NVA, but no more so than you would expect from an Establishment newspaper, and they no doubt gain something in the editing. Normally he’d be pretty far down on our list of potential targets, but something has come up that indicates that we need to take a closer look at him and ask him some questions, and we need to do it fast. Like tonight, if we can. We have to get him
off somewhere away from his buddies and his FATPO escort, so we can detain him, take him to a secure location, and find out what he knows regarding a particular matter. This may turn out to be very important and time-sensitive information indeed, and if it is at all possible we would like for this to be done so that his colleagues and the Fatties don’t know he’s been abducted, because if they know we’ve taken him they may be able to guess why, and that might blow the whole thing. The only way we can think of to do this is to set a honey trap. We’re going to need a Lorelei. Becky, you indicated once that you were willing to do that duty if it was required. That time is now. Are you still willing?”

  Annette glanced at Eric, who nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yes, Lieutenant, I am.”

  “I warn you that this is going to be a rush job, and it may go bad,” Jackson told her. “If we can’t keep you off the security cameras, it may well lead to blowing your cover and forcing you to go under and become a U-boat. There goes your education and maybe your whole future.”

  “Eric and I have talked about that,” said Annette. “We knew what we were in for when we said yes that day in the car, at Flammus’ funeral. If that’s the way it plays out, that’s the way it plays out.”

  “If that happens, I go under with her too,” said Eric.

  “We understand that. You’re a good team and we wouldn’t want to break you up,” Bresler assured him.

  “Thank you, comrade,” said Jackson. There was a tap on the door, and Bresler admitted a small and pudgy young man with a buzz cut, carrying a large canvas gym bag. “Comrade Becky, this is Comrade Stiggs. He specializes in false ID, and you’re going to need some right away. But first we need to select your coiffure for the evening.”

  From the bag, Stiggs produced four women’s wigs, two longhaired, one neck-length bob, and one short pageboy style. “That’s all I could round up on short notice,” he explained apologetically. Bresler pulled out a fairly large mirror and set it up on one of the metal shelves. After some preliminary experimentation and comments from the men, they settled on a longhaired black wig, the one Annette found most comfortable.