“Well, we were canoodling some of the time,” said Annette defensively.
“No longer my concern since you turned eighteen,” Ray told them. “Anyway, I racked my brains trying to think of what to do. I was absolutely sure you were in the process of destroying your lives, but having already lost one daughter to this horror show we call a society, I had to be very careful about how I intervened, since I knew that one slip could make things infinitely worse. To make a long story short, I knew someone who knew someone else who knew someone else in turn, multiply that by about ten more relays and you get the idea. One evening I sat down in an undisclosed location and I had a long talk with one of the most fascinating and brilliant men I’ve ever met, a fellow named Henry Morehouse, aka Red Morehouse, aka Mr. Chips. Have you met him?”
“We know the name,” said Eric. “He’s supposed to be AC.”
“Close enough. Anyway, Red has the most incredible ability to look you right in the eye and say out loud things that you’ve been thinking all your life but never dared to speak, thoughts you hardly dared to acknowledge even to yourself. I came to him to try and find out if my daughter and her boyfriend were involved with what I viewed as a gang of criminals. I stayed to listen, and to my own surprise I ended up offering to help. I was then put in touch with another fascinating and brilliant young man who goes by the name of Oscar.”
“Now him, we know,” admitted Annette.
“Yes, he told me.” Annette noticed they were now on Highway 30 headed west, and assumed they were going into Bandit Country. “Oscar made me no promises, except that he would inform me if anything happened to either of you, and by then I accepted that because I knew that’s how it had to be. There’s a war on, and winning it has to take precedence over personal considerations. It took actually meeting with these NVA men to show me who they were and what they were about, and to understand that you are now both adults and you’re capable of making your own decisions. You have been an adult for a long time, of course, Annette. If your sister had lived, I doubt if she ever would have been. But as worried and as fearful as I was about you both, and still am, I realize that whether I like it or not, history has caught up with all of us, bitten us in the ass, and tag, we’re it.”
“Uh, sir, may I ask what your role in the Army is? In a general way?” asked Eric. Ray turned off onto a side road.
“We’re coming up on where the first Fattie checkpoints usually start,” he said casually. Annette still couldn’t get over having her father smack in the middle of her and Eric’s secret life; it was almost like seeing an elephant in church. “As to what I do for the Army,” he went on, “It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, a lot of intelligence gathering, some of which I understand you two have actually been duplicating. But mostly I am now working in one of the most little known and yet in its own way vital aspects of any war or revolution, the economic side of things. Not just contacts and moving money, although some of that—I’m the first full-fledged banker to sign on, and they were overjoyed to get me—but actual economic planning for the future Northwest Republic to come. The Army Council is aware of the risks of too quick a victory, as odd as that may sound. They know that if all of a sudden the American authority collapses like it did in the former Soviet Union, they don’t want to find themselves as a bunch of gunmen who only know how to pull triggers and rig detonators, sitting on top of a situation they don’t know how to control or work with. It is possible to win the war and lose the peace. They mean to hit the ground running so they can actually build a functioning state, a viable economy, and a sane and stable society based on real productivity and economic sanity. That’s a mighty tall order, and I have to say, I’m loving every minute of it.”
“Would you have joined if it hadn’t been for Jan?” asked Annette.
“Count on you to cut right to the nub,” chuckled her father. “Yes, I think so, if the opportunity had offered. Annette, I don’t have to tell you what Jan’s death did to me and to your mother. But this isn’t about avenging your sister, although for a while I thought maybe it was. It’s not about Jan, it’s about me, about becoming the kind of man I should have become long ago. Remember a conversation we had in the den the night of the funeral, honey? When I was giving you that whole spiel about how you have to go along to get along, all that tripe? I sensed that I dropped in your estimation that night, and that ate at me, because I knew I should have diminished in your regard, that what I was saying was basically nothing more than the elaborate excuse of a coward. Someone who believes himself to be a coward is not a happy man, I can tell you. Then Flammus got his. I knew perfectly well that you two had done it, and I had to face the fact that a pair of 17-year-olds had shown me up, had done what I lacked the physical and moral courage to do. I can’t undo the past or change the man I was, honey, but I can change the man I will be in the future, and I intend to.”
“Have you said anything to Mom, about either of us?” asked Annette.
“Oh, good God, no! Here we are.”
Annette didn’t know what road they were on, but her father pulled the car into the driveway of a house with white weatherproof siding house and a concrete driveway. He parked and they got out. Ray walked up to the door and gave a series of knocks, and Lieutenant Jimmy Wingo opened the door. When they got into the living room, Oscar rose to greet them. “I’ve been watching your television debut,” he said, indicating the TV. One of the local stations was running the security camera footage from the student union again, and they all watched the short, violent episode play out, Ray Ridgeway’s face expressionless as he watched one of Zion’s dogs hurl his daughter up against a wall and point a loaded pistol at her head. “Usually we want a full debriefing when something like this happens, but I’d say that film clip pretty much says it all. Anything to add?”
“We’re grateful for the retrieval, but we were a bit surprised when we saw who the driver was,” said Eric, nodding at Ray Ridgeway. “How did he come to be there, sir?”
“Jim reported to me when you guys yelled Texas Tea, and I happened to be with Comrade Ridgeway senior going over a few things when the call came in,” said Oscar. “Technically I suppose it was need to know, and he didn’t need to know, but sometimes common decency has to trump procedure, so I told him you guys were in the wind and he volunteered to make the recovery run.”
“Do you need me anymore tonight, Oscar?” asked Ray.
“No. We need to plot a new career path for our two recently unemployed comrades here,” said Oscar. “In view of your relationship, of course, you can sit in if you like.”
“What I don’t know, I can’t tell,” said Ray. “I expect I’ll find FBI or Fatties or both at my house when I get back. Thank God my wife is out of town visiting her sister, although that probably means she’s going to learn about Annette from seeing her on TV. That’s bad, but better than if armed niggers in body armor simply kicked in the door without warning. I will of course be utterly shocked and appalled at the news of my daughter’s wicked ways, but they may not buy it and they might decide to take me to one of those cellars in the Justice Center for a little physical experimentation.”
“Can’t you pull him under as well, sir?” asked Annette in alarm.
“That’s not possible, honey,” said Ray. “In order for me to be of any use to the movement I must stay where I am. No one else can do what I’m doing right now. Don’t worry, I’m sufficiently well connected so they’ll tread lightly with me. I hope. But if I’m wrong and they do try to break me, I cannot, must not know anything about your whereabouts or what you are doing. I would die before knowingly betraying you, but we all know these bastards have their dirty ways of getting anything out of anyone. I couldn’t live with that. You’ll be changing locations right away, Oscar?”
“They’ll be miles away before you get back to town, Ray,” Oscar assured him. “Actually, I was going to ask them if they would be interested in coming on board officially with Third Section. Lieutenant Wingo’s
scowl tells us he doesn’t like us cherry-picking his best people. Few line companies do. But you two have shown a talent for the work, and we can use you in areas besides Portland, which will be too hot to hold you for a time.”
“Well, this is it, then,” said Ray with a sigh. “I don’t know when I will be seeing either of you again, but I presume I need not tell you that you will both be in my thoughts and my prayers, always.” He solemnly shook hands with Eric, then leaned over and kissed his daughter on the forehead. “I’ll do my best to help your mother through this, and if anything happens to either of us, Oscar here will get word to you. Mind how you go, comrades,” he said gently.
“You too, Dad,” replied Annette.
XXVIII
The Butcher’s Bill
Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Julius Caesar—Act II, Scene 2
Portland in the winter was never a cheery place at the best of times, but in this fourth winter of The Trouble it was a grim and haggard zone of concrete berms and razor wire, bombed-out storefronts and buildings, and sullen people hurrying silently through rainy streets while trying to avoid the constant FATPO patrols and checkpoints that seemed to lurk around every corner in the central part of the city. Even citizens who had nothing to do with the NVA and who supported the government politically tried to avoid the body-armored thugs, who had quickly gained an evil reputation for corruption, bullying, brutality, and sudden outbursts of mindless violence. Those wealthy Unionists who could afford to do so were quietly finding excuses to leave the city for places outside the Northwest, not wanting to expose themselves and their families to the NVA, but also out of a desire to avoid the attentions and exactions of their federal “protectors” as well.
Overall, things were going badly for the Americans. Chelsea Clinton’s accession to the White House a few days before had been a low-key affair, her inaugural speech televised from the Oval Office because the Secret Service didn’t dare let the President of the United States show her face in public for fear of assassination. Chelsea’s whole presidency was being greeted with what might be termed polite skepticism by the media and the country as a whole. It was an open secret that her Sea Hag of a mother was still calling the shots and running the United States government from behind the scenes. Hillary hadn’t even bothered to move out of the White House. Even old man Bill was still to be seen on occasion, shambling the corridors in a drug-induced stupor in flip-flops, sometimes wearing an old bathrobe and sometimes in his underwear, setting off security alarms when he forgot his limited-access swipe card.
The American empire was clearly on the verge of collapse. Despite the annual draft of over a million young people, the United States simply couldn’t maintain the huge armies required to fight low-level insurgencies in a dozen countries. The casualty rate of over ten thousand dead per month was finally beginning to bite, even in a country the size of the U.S.A. Despite every effort to sweep them out of public view and hide them away, the streets and malls of America were now full of mangled veterans who were missing arms and legs or who had been driven insane, begging for small change, talking to themselves.
In the Northwest itself, an odd and unstable situation had developed. Wide swaths of the countryside, mountains and high desert and deep forests, farmlands and seaside hamlets, and even some medium-sized towns, were essentially liberated territory. This included Clatsop County and the Oregon coastal environs. There were hundreds of communities, now all white, that had developed ways to self-sustain and take care of their own in the increasing absence of any help or support from the cities or from the federal authority. Local government under men like Sheriff Ted Lear and countless other small towns’ mayors, police chiefs, and city councils now actually meant something once again. One could always tell when one was in such a free zone, because the flagpoles on government buildings and schools were bare, or sometimes flew only a state flag. They didn’t dare fly the Stars and Stripes, and the NVA was sufficiently diplomatic not to demand they fly the Northwest Tricolor just yet.
The cities themselves still contained concentrations of federal troops and at least a partially functioning civil administration. Up and down the Puget Sound metroplex, in a few remaining islands of federal control such as Spokane, Boise, Eugene, and of course Portland, the writ of the D.C. government still ran. Sometimes. Periodically FATPO and whatever military was available back on brief rotation from the Middle East would descend by air on some rural district and conduct wide sweeps through the area, making arrests off lists of real and suspected NVA sympathizers, demolishing people’s homes with bulldozers, and in some cases rounding up whole neighborhoods and towns for deportation to the camps in Nevada and North Dakota. The NVA would melt before them and then begin nipping at the Americans’ heels and extremities, sniping, cutting off patrols and wiping them out, demolishing vehicles and sometimes whole convoys with IEDs, assassinating local Unionist collaborators and local officials who assisted the government forces, and sometimes staging lightning attacks on FATPO bases and camps. The Pacific Northwest was incredibly immense, and the United States simply did not have enough armed manpower to put a soldier behind every tree.
Those who resisted the concept of armed struggle before the war had always claimed that ZOG’s immense technological advantages prohibited guerrilla warfare in North America, but it turned out that this simply wasn’t the case. True, the government was fairly competent at tracking many NVA movements around the Homeland via satellite. What they lacked was the manpower and the capability to do anything about such movements. They tried things like unmanned assassination drones, pinpoint bombing, and even Cruise missiles, but the results were poor and collateral damage to civilians was always great, sowing more hatred against the United States government, just as such strikes had done throughout the Middle East. America’s “smart” military technology was never by any means as smart as it was made out to be. The feds tried dropping Special Forces A-Teams and larger Ranger-style companies into small towns and mountainous areas to hunt down and destroy NVA flying columns and base camps, and there were frequent fierce fire-fights and skirmishes far from civilization that the NVA did not always win, such as the complete annihilation of the famous Olympic Flying Column under Commandant Tom Murdock and his famous partner, the beautiful Melanie Young. But the ultimate effect always fell far short of what the authorities anticipated, because they simply no longer had the resources to follow up on their local victories, and the rebels always came seeping back into areas that had been allegedly pacified the month before. It wasn’t that the Americans had learned nothing from Iraq and Iran; it was simply that they had not yet figured out any way to use their superior materials and technology to break the human spirit.
Of all the NVA tactics used so far during the rebellion, the most effective and the one which struck the most terror into the established order in urban terrain was the use of snipers. It was the fear of sniper attacks that actually drove the non-whites off the streets and into their tightly-packed neighborhoods, and which caused the American security forces their biggest headaches in protecting their own personnel, keeping them jittery, off-balance and paranoid so that they never were quite able to mount a full court press offensive against Jerry Reb.
When the war had begun, most sniping had been a matter of floating, an almost casual seizing of any target that offered by anybody with a rifle. A Volunteer cruised around with his weapon in the back seat or the trunk and took any opportunity to bag a monkoid or two, or pop a round at a cop, and then he hauled ass. Those days were gone. There were few lone wolves left in the game. Sniper teams were now carefully assembled and trained and moved around by NVA field commanders like chess pieces on a board. They consisted of three people, a marksman, a spotter who served as a backup marksman, and a driver who also served as rear guard, watching the first two’s backs while they took position, sighted in, and took their shot. Sometimes the shooters could b
e lying on a rooftop or up a tree or in a culvert for hours waiting for a target to appear. There weren’t as many of the hunters as were generally believed. Successful hunting in cities that were chock full of security cameras on every corner, helicopters overhead, a population where informing was still an ever-present risk, and an overwhelming enemy response force within close distance of any given point at any given time, was a lot harder than the media made it seem. Any fool could shoot somebody down on the street, but given the speed with which FATPO could chopper in stop-groups and seal off an area, getting away and living to fire another day was the problem. Successful hunting day in and day out in the cramped confines of Portland was like trying to spearfish in a massive school of sharks who would turn and strike the moment they smelled blood.
The pool of available targets had shrunk considerably since the war began, as mass paranoia set in among the city’s blacks, Mexicans, liberals, bureaucrats and journalists. They stayed in their own neighborhoods, guarded not only by cops and Fatties, but by private security forces in the wealthier enclaves and by neighborhood watches in the ghettos and barrios that warned of any strange white faces on the streets. Anyone white driving into predominantly black, Hispanic, rich, or sodomitic parts of town was certain to be repeatedly stopped, searched and harassed, and maybe given a good beating behind a FATPO Stryker for good measure if they protested. Employed blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other potential targets were ferried back and forth to work by armored vans and buses. Windows in office buildings and stores were either steel-shuttered or replaced by bulletproof Plexiglass. Open areas and squares in the town, the public parks, and up and down the highways where potential targets might be spotted on foot or coming in and out of facilities were either fortified with Bremer walls, or else screened with huge fences comprised of opaque nylon netting in order to obscure visibility. For example, most shopping mall parking lots that weren’t underground were now enclosed in perimeters of this tennis-net type fence, making it difficult to find a good firing position in the surrounding area that gave a clear view of the lot. So were all open areas in the integrated public schools or anywhere else that minorities might still be found. Major target areas like the Justice Center had become self-contained cities with hotel-like living quarters and apartments, as well as facilities such as grocery stores, banks, gyms, bars and restaurants, a Mighty Mart, and day care centers inside the Bremer walls.
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