The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  Ratcliff sighed. “I called a formation after that—that ghastly spectacle at Longview. I talked to my people. To my horror but not to my surprise, some of them want to stay here and join you. Probably more of us would stay if our families weren’t elsewhere in the country.”

  “And vulnerable to American retaliation,” said Hatfield. “May I ask where your own wife and children are?”

  “With my wife’s parents in Amherst, Massachusetts. Once things started getting bad here, you will pardon me if I didn’t trust their safety to your Aryan chivalry. You seem to be a fairly decent guy yourself, Hatfield, but you’ve got maniacs like O.C. Oglevy and that crazy hillbilly John Corbett Morgan riding with you as well. I couldn’t take that risk.”

  “I understand.”

  “Anyway, fact is, I really don’t have squat to resist you with. I think as much of my people as you do of yours, and I won’t murder them in a cause that I have just this morning learned is lost. Can we do this without any humiliating surrender ceremonies, Hatfield? We keep our colors, officers keep their sidearm, so forth and so on?”

  “If you’ve got a band you can march out while they play,” said Hatfield. “Do you have enough vehicles to transport your men? If so then we’ll give them an escort to Portland as far as the first American outposts on Highway 30.”

  “I’d prefer to cut over to Salem and head down to California on the interstate,” said Ratcliff. “I would rather not meet up with General Partman right at the moment.”

  “I can imagine,” said Hatfield sympathetically. “My intelligence guy in the suit over there says you and he have been doing a lot of cyber-yakking. Don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what all that was about? A little hint?”

  Ratcliff looked up into the sky. “This is a beautiful place, Hatfield. Good people. I envy you, being born here, growing up here.”

  “It had its moments,” agreed Hatfield. He nodded back to where Julia and Erica were watching as the cameraman filmed. “She was one of them.”

  Ratcliff looked at him. “You know Partman is planning on attacking the towns here as well, Astoria and Warrenton? Not just the bridges? B-52s, F-16s, and Apaches? He’s planning to punish the people here for their wicked racism.”

  “Yes, I know. Enraged tyrants always punish those who refuse to bend the knee,” replied Hatfield. “You don’t have to worry about the B-52s, though. Some of our extraordinary young people took care of them last night. They’re toast on the runway up there now. What did Partman want you to do?”

  Ratcliff appeared to make a decision. “He wanted me to make sure some items we had here were DX’d and rendered completely unserviceable. He was very anxious they shouldn’t fall into your hands.”

  “And did you?”

  “I couldn’t seem to find them,” said Ratcliff. “I think I was about to check the hard store in Hangar 19.” He pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket. “Since you’re relieving me of my command, perhaps you can also relieve me of that responsibility.”

  Two hours later, after the last of the Coast Guardsmen had evacuated the station and were on their way south under escort, one of the chief petty officers who had elected to stay on showed Zack, Hill, and Len Ekstrom what was in Hangar 19. It was a small storeroom stacked high with long OD green plastic crates. “The big brass was always paranoid about suicide attacks from airplanes ever since 9/11,” the sailor explained. “They were always scared you guys were going to hijack an airliner and ram it into the big bridge or the station here or some stupid crap like that. They got so paranoid they sent us all these babies.”

  “Good God!” exclaimed Len Ekstrom “Stinger missiles!”

  “No wonder Partman wanted them destroyed!” said Hill excitedly. “There must be at least 50 of them in here!”

  “Oscar, contact the Army Council. Put out the word all through the NDF,” said Hatfield. “Make it fast, but above all make it top secret. This is a priority. We are going to need every Volunteer with military experience who has ever fired, or handled, or who knows anything at all about Stingers.”

  “I do, sir,” said the CPO. “Me and at least four of the guys who stayed. If you’re short on vets who’ve used these weapons, we can work up a quick training course for the new crews.”

  “It will have to be a real quick course. Chief, you know Partman’s coming with his F-16s and copters?” said Hatfield keenly. “This morning you were a member of the United States military. Technically you still are. The men flying those machines will be as well. Are you willing to fire on them in order to protect the people of this community and the future of this new country?”

  “I’m from up in Anacortes, Washington, sir,” said the Coast Guardsman. “That makes this my country.”

  “No, comrade,” said Hatfield, shaking his head. “You are a white man, and that is what makes this your country.”

  * * *

  Hatfield’s fabled luck held. Thanks to multifarious political mumbling and maneuvering, it wasn’t until the morning of October 27th that Partman launched his aerial assault on the Columbia River bridges, two F-16s loaded with bombs and missiles and four Apache gunships apiece against Astoria and Longview. The Stingers had been equally distributed between the two targets, and as the jets swooped in the hand-held missiles were fired almost like an old-fashioned volley of musketry. Even though the crews were half composed of new and inexperienced Volunteers, the effect was devastating. Of the Longview attack force, only two Apaches made it back to Portland. One of the F-16s crashed into the town and killed several people on the ground, and before it went down in a flaming spiral the second was able to get one missile hit on the bridge which blew a gaping hole in the tarmac and girders that was temporarily but effectively repaired within 24 hours. The Astoria attack force was completely wiped out, both F-16s disintegrating in mid-air and raining fire and molten metal into the Columbia River, causing geysers of steam to explode into the air. Two of the Astoria Apaches were blown to pieces by the Stingers, and one was shot down by machine gun fire. The fourth helicopter was forced down on the River Walk, where its Mexican pilot and black co-pilot were chased down by a mob of irate citizens who didn’t appreciate being treated like Iraqi villagers, beaten to death with whatever came to hand, and then dragged down ironically re-named Lockhart Boulevard on ropes behind two pickup trucks.

  On October 30th the Nationalist General Robert DiBella crossed the newly repaired Longview bridge from Washington to the Oregon side, bringing with him 14,000 NDF troops including 2,000 members of the crack new Special Service or SS, one unit of which called itself the Jesse Lockhart Brigade. He joined forces in Clatskanie with General Zack Hatfield, commanding around 8,000 more men, and together they began a careful enveloping movement eastward toward Portland, not just over the main highways which were vulnerable to air attack, but down logging roads and rural routes, guided by local men provided by Hatfield’s Third Brigade. At the same time General Robert Gair, newly arrived from the Longview peace conference, moved in on Portland from Salem in the south with about 16,000 men. Across the river in Vancouver, Washington, SS General Carter Wingfield had massed 45,000 NDF troops including Panzer units of captured or surrendered American tanks, as well as a formidable artillery train courtesy of defecting U.S Army troops from Fort Lewis.

  On Halloween night Zack and Julia stood on the south bank of the Columbia, a few miles up from the City of Roses. The night was cold but clear, and there was thunder and lightning up the river. “Those sound like cannons! That son of a bitch Partman!” swore Julia, hugging Zack for warmth. “He’s shelling Vancouver!”

  Zack studied the low flashing lights in the distance. “No, Julie,” he said. “I’m pretty sure those flashes are coming from the north side of the river. Those are Carter Wingfield’s boys. Those are our guns. The guns of white men who mean to be free.”

  The assault on Portland had begun.

  XXX

  Names On The Wall

  “Here was a royal fellowship of death . .
.”

  King Henry V.—Act Four, Scene 8

  It was October 22nd. Wayne Hill could see through his office window that the autumn afternoon outside was bright, golden and crisp, a perfect Northwest Independence Day.

  It was now fifteen years since the bloody morning in Coeur d’Alene, when outraged white men had finally arisen in arms to strike at the bloody claw of Zion that sought the lives of their children. It had been ten years since the Tricolor had gone up over the Longview conference, and the Northwest Republic had proclaimed its independence. Hill still couldn’t quite grasp in his own mind the fantastic changes that had taken place in the Homeland since the Revolution. Wherever he went now, he looked out over a clean, peaceful and prosperous world that had overcome every obstacle to establish a society that was stable, just, compassionate, safe, and fearless, a nation strong with faith in the destiny of this land and her people. Despite the sanctions and shortages of the early years, despite the monotonous threats of war and invasion from the rest of the world, despite the constant bombardment of screaming hatred from the media and the politicians from what remained of the world’s Judaic liberal democracies, despite all the problems, every year white people Came Home to the Northwest by the hundreds of thousands. They ran the barbed wire and the minefields from Aztlan, Canada, and the United States. They dodged the helicopters and the shoot-to-kill patrols. They snuck in via the cargo holds of blockade-running ships and planes. They used every conceivable subterfuge somehow to bring themselves and their families to this land where their present and their future had been won and secured by the sword, and where they were willing to die if need be to live among their own, and only among their own.

  The oak-paneled office where Wayne Hill now sat at a desk of polished Northwest oak, a fire crackling in an open hearth, was in the city of Olympia, just across the street from the legislative building that housed Parliament, a structure which with delicious irony had been modeled after the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. It was there that the first National Convention had met in the days after Longview. Hill himself was now the Director of the Bureau of State Security, or BOSS as it was known. Mostly he and his men wore civilian clothes on duty. But on this Independence Day he was wearing the BOSS formal uniform that inspired both dread and respect within the Homeland and around the world, the simple boots and tunic and cap of an NDF private without a single insignia, badge of rank, or decoration except for the War of Independence medal that all veterans of that heroic time wore. Hill and his department were largely responsible for the prosperity, the stability, and the safety that the people of the N.A.R. now enjoyed. The Americans and world Jewry had spent the last ten years plotting against the life of the infant nation. It was like living in a fine house with a den of cobras nesting in the basement, but every time the Judaic serpent had reared to strike, Hill and his BOSS agents, and a hundred other strong white arms from every service and every walk of life crushed the reptile’s head. Until the next time.

  “Remember,” Hill always told his new agents, “The Jews are still immensely richer than us, their slaves are more numerous than we are, their resources more vast than ours, and they are still far more powerful than we are. They can afford mistakes. We can’t. ZOG only has to win once. We have to win every time.”

  There was a knock on Hill’s door. “Come in,” he said. The door opened and Special Service General William Jackson walked in, wearing full black dress uniform with silver piping, Swastika armband, peaked cap and dagger. He had a paper file folder under his arm. “Hey, Billy. I see you’re all dolled up for your speech,” said Hill.

  “Yeah, I have to go in a few minutes,” said Jackson. “NBA is broadcasting it on the Government Channel.”

  “And what’s your competition?” asked Hill with a smile. “A 1950s Western on Channel Four and cartoons on the Children’s Channel?”

  “Actually, Channel Four is showing Braveheart, like they always do on Independence Day, and some of these new cartoons are actually pretty good,” said Jackson. “You’ve seen Kappy the Kike?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that one. It’s cute,” agreed Hill. “You know it’s a straight rip-off of the old Road Runner cartoons? Kappy is constantly trying to steal somebody’s money or gold or jewels, and he’s always getting blown up, or impaled, or fed to alligators, or pushed off cliffs and otherwise mangled by Deputy Dawg and his animal friends. The little kids love it. Our satellites and internet stations are broadcasting it the world over, and every week somebody in the U.S. Congress screams bloody murder.”

  “Look, there’s something I wanted to see you about,” said Jackson seriously. “I was going to put it off until after the holiday but, well, I kind of wanted to just get it over with. This is a great day, ten years on since Longview, and I didn’t want to have to think about this while I’m speechifying about how great a day it is.”

  “That sounds pretty grim,” said Hill with a frown. “What is it?”

  Jackson took a deep breath. “You remember back all those years ago when you were Threesec’s man in Portland, around the second year or so of the war, when you vowed and swore on a stack of Mein Kampfs that there was a spy somewhere in First Brigade? And we all thought you were full of sheep dip?”

  “I still maintain I was right. The pattern was there,” said Hill.

  “Well, actually, it turns out you were right,” said Jackson with a embarrassed sigh. “As you may recall, when we finally got hold of Portland we went through what was left of the records of the various secret police agencies operating in the city, almost all of which were on computer drives. We didn’t find too much. They had ample time to destroy or remove most of it, plus a lot of their drives and backups got busted up in the shelling and shooting, so forth and so on. As a matter of routine we also confiscated and inventoried the contents of all the private safe deposit boxes in the Portland banks. All of this was pretty rushed, since we had 50-eleven different other things we had to do, we didn’t know if the enemy was going to counter-attack . . . hell, you remember how it was.”

  “I remember,” nodded Hill.

  “One of the safe deposit boxes we glommed was rented by one Elena Martinez, a detective lieutenant in the old Portland Police Bureau. You remember a spook and spic team in the Hatecrimes unit called the Mami and the Monkey?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Hill.

  “Well, for whatever reason, probably blackmail or ass-covering of some kind, the Martinez woman seems to have run off a hard copy of a whole snitch file on the police printer, according to the tag line and date on the pages here, then absconded with the file and stashed it in a safe deposit box,” said Jackson. “After things settled down, the Party eventually got around to assigning clerical teams to go over the mass of documents captured during the War of Independence, including the contents of all the Portland safe deposit boxes we’d appropriated. But as you know, we were always terribly short-handed, there was always higher priority stuff to do, and somehow, I have no clue how, this one folder kept finding its way to the bottom of the pile, and then getting lost, or misfiled, or God knows what.”

  “For ten years?” asked Hill incredulously.

  “For ten years. I guess bureaucracy is one Zionist curse we still haven’t fully eliminated yet. Maybe it was looked over by some little girl from the Labor Service with her mind on her boyfriend, or some guy thinking about what was for lunch or something, or it just didn’t register and whoever it was simply didn’t realize what they were holding in their hands. Whatever the story is, two days ago one of the permanent staff cleaning out the last of the backlog finally opened this file and read the damned thing, understood its historical relevance, and since I was the most senior Party member in the building at the time she brought it right upstairs to my attention, which I’m glad she did. At least that way I was able to keep it out of regular channels for a bit, until you decide how you want to handle it.” Jackson sighed again.

  “How bad is it?” asked Hill gently.

  “Pre
tty bad. I always liked her and admired her. Thank God she’s dead.”

  “Who is it, Bill? Who was it, I should say?”

  Jackson threw the file down on Hill’s desk. “Kicky McGee,” he said, almost weeping. “Kicky fucking McGee!”

  “Damn!” cursed Hill softly. “You can write me down an ass on this one, Bill, as Constable Dogberry would say. I never suspected her once. Hell, I was the one who approved bringing her in, after she mysteriously showed up at an important meeting one night instead of the contact who should have been there, who subsequently turned out to be conveniently dead at the hands of the cops. God, what was I thinking? My brain must have been swinging through the trees that night! Did she rat out the crew and set up the ambush on Flanders Street when we went after the Vice President?”

  “That’s not clear from the file,” said Jackson. “It stops abruptly after that event. No further comments, nothing to indicate any further contact, zip.”

  “But hold on, this doesn’t make sense!” said Hill. “You remember that Kicky McGee was on Task Force Director’s Cut? She went on the team with me and Charlie Randall and Cat Lockhart down to Hollywood, in fact she was one of the triggers in the Kodak Theater on Oscar night, and she was with us all through Operation We Are Not Amused. If she was an informer, why the hell didn’t she blow the whistle on that operation, take all of us out, and save Hollywood for the Kosher Nostra? She knew about Erica Collingwood, for Christ’s sake, but Erica wasn’t burned for months afterward, until that kike Shulman got onto her tail. If she was ratting us out there’s no way the feds wouldn’t have gotten most or all of us!”

  “You know what I think, Oscar?” Jackson had unconsciously lapsed back into the old NVA lingo. “I think they must have pressured her into doing it, but it looks like she broke with them. You know the Wingos adopted her daughter after the war? The little girl was on the run with her grandmother for a long time before that, and I remember Kicky talking about the child sometimes, but now that I think about it, she always kind of avoided the subject if she could. There may have been a coercion situation there. The file does stop after Flanders Street.”