Hunter

by Andrew Macdonald

  Harry had been looking thoughtful while Saul and Oscar were speaking. Now he spoke again: “I don’t see anything wrong with what you have in mind. It could be five years, even longer, before we’re ready to do anything exciting with Saul’s audience. In that time we might bring some of them a long way. Certainly not all of them, or even most of them. Christianity is a slave religion, and that suits the nature of a lot of White people, unfortunately. They can’t get along without the idea of a Big Daddy in the sky to watch over them. They’ll never be taught to stand on their own feet, to think like aristocrats, to have an aristocratic religion. But some of them will, and those may become an important source of new recruits for us. But we’ll have to be very careful with the way we try to swing them around, so that we don’t lose the bulk of them or arouse the suspicion of the Jews.”

  “The Jews are bound to be suspicious,” Oscar came back. “They’d be suspicious even if we didn’t try to put a racial message into Saul’s sermons. Being suspicious is their nature. But if we keep it subliminal and if we’re careful not to attack any of their more immediate interests, such as Israel, I think we can get away with it. Saul’s ratings are so good now that they love him. He’s pulling the viewers in and making money for them as well as for us. And remember, we plan to develop Saul into a multi-media operation, just like Caldwell and the others. The ones who respond well to his television message can be carried further with mailings of printed materials. That’ll allow us gradually to separate the goats from the sheep without going further than the sheep are capable of going.”

  Three days later, on July 1, the unemployment figures for May were released. Total unemployment had risen half a per cent since April, to 9.7 per cent, but the increase for the month was less than half the previous month’s increase, and government spokesmen declared unemployment “under control” and predicted confidently that it would be dropping again soon.

  XXXI

  Actually, the government didn’t have things under quite as firm control as it would have liked. The crime rate had been rising right along with unemployment. Muggings, burglaries, and auto theft were up sharply, month after month. Labor disturbances also were a growing problem. For the most part these were localized, but on the Fourth of July there were huge demonstrations by unemployed workers in New York, Washington, Detroit, San Francisco, and half-a-dozen other major cities. In both Washington and San Francisco the demonstrations became violent, with smashed plate glass and overturned, burning vehicles littering the demonstration areas. Looting of stores by Blacks in Washington became heavy. When the police tried to stop it, the Blacks turned to arson. By the evening of the fifth, 20 square blocks of the capital were in flames, and snipers were holding the fire fighters at bay.

  Again Ryan held back, waiting for the right moment to use his muscle, when he could count on both official and public approval for his actions. That moment came after the wind had shifted during the night and carried the smoke from the burning area over the White residential sections of the city to the west. A thermal inversion, very rare for Washington, kept the smoke close to the ground. The dense, choking pall was especially heavy in Georgetown, where many legislators, diplomats, and officials had apartments or town houses. A panicky attempt at exodus via automobile quickly jammed the narrow streets, and coughing motorists abandoned their vehicles, forcing other drivers behind them to do the same. Rescue teams had to go in on foot with gas masks to lead thousands of other residents to safety. The next morning Congressional leaders were furious and demanded strong action immediately. The President called Ryan at ii o’clock.

  Ryan was ready. As in Miami he had been gathering information from his undercover agents since the beginning of the disturbance. In his “war room” at Agency headquarters the locations of all fires, street barricades, gatherings of Black rioters, and reported snipers were indicated on a huge, electronic wall map of the city, which was updated second by second.

  He went in just before noon with a dozen helicopter gunships, each carrying a team of heavily armed agents and a television news crew. Buildings from which sniper fire had been reported were rocketed and raked repeatedly with 20-mm cannon fire before flak-jacketed agents with assault rifles were lowered to their roofs.

  Other helicopters swooped over groups of Blacks on the streets and dropped specially rigged clusters of concussion grenades into their midst. This tactic had spectacular results and made especially entertaining viewing for those watching the live television coverage of the Agency’s assault on the rioters. One moment the telescreen showed hundreds of Blacks in the street below, shaking their fists defiantly at the helicopter above and shouting obscenities. Then there were a hundred practically instantaneous flashes scattered among the crowd and a deafening, staccato explosion. All that could be seen after that were horizontal Black bodies strewn grotesquely on the pavement. Finally, about half of the bodies would struggle to their feet and begin running in every direction as fast as their legs would carry them. A few of the others would begin crawling or attempting to drag themselves away, while the rest remained still. An Agency spokesman referred to the grenade-dropping devices the helicopters were equipped with as “riot busters.” They had been newly developed by the Agency and were expected to be standard equipment in the future.

  Within two hours the Agency assault had suppressed the sniping completely and virtually cleared the streets of Blacks in the riot area, except in two large vacant lots, where more than a thousand prisoners had been herded until they could be bussed away. All the fires were out by nightfall.

  The image the public had of the Agency’s suppression of the Washington riot was one of decisiveness, professionalism, and irresistible force. The contrast with the ineffective tactics of the Washington police was inescapable. Just as after the Miami riot two months earlier, opinion surveys found an overwhelming White approval for the Agency, with churchmen being the only White dissenters worth mentioning. Comments expressed in letters to editors and on radio talk shows ranged from the prissily conservative “the government must be firm with lawless elements” to the robust “we’ve finally got somebody in Washington who knows how to deal with niggers.” The 312 Blacks killed by Ryan’s agents in putting down the riot were a mere statistic on the inside pages, cited by no one except angry Black leaders, who made comparisons with the 1960 shooting of Black rioters by South African police at Sharpville.

  On July 22 the Congress approved a supplemental appropriation for the Agency allowing it to hire and train an additional 2,500 agents and 1,500 support personnel — more than doubling its strength.

  On July 24 the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a revision in its unemployment figures for April and May, raising both totals by nearly one percentage point. On August 3 the figures for June were released: the total for that month was 13.6 per cent. It was estimated that the figure for July might have gone as high as 15 per cent.

  On the same day the President signed an Executive Order indefinitely suspending the civil rights of persons suspected of conspiring to engage in activities which might cause a riot or other public disorder.

  Other news had held the public’s attention during July, but the first reports of seizures and prosecutions under the Horowitz Act began appearing then as well. Just as Harry had predicted seven months earlier, it was the Ku Klux Klan and a few ragtag neo-Nazi groups which were the initial targets of the Board of Examination set up to examine and approve or disapprove suspect books and other printed materials. The civil libertarians kept their mouths shut, and the impression given by the controlled media was one of a nearly unanimous public approval for the suppression of the “hate” groups and the burning of their literature.

  The only noteworthy dissent occurred in August when the Board recommended the banning of a newly published book on AIDS — The Growing Threat of AIDS in America — and the prosecution of its author and publisher. The book, written in a semi-popular fashion by Dr Harvey Crossland, a prominent medical researcher at Johns Ho
pkins University, analyzed the ways in which the disease was infecting heterosexual Whites, who until recently had remained nearly free of it. He placed a heavy blame on bisexuals, who acted as carriers of the HIV virus from its reservoir in the homosexual population to the relatively uninfected heterosexual population; and on promiscuous White persons who engaged in sex both with Blacks, who formed another reservoir for the virus, and with Whites. He pointed out that the only really effective way to prevent the further spread of the deadly disease would be to check everyone for the virus and then quarantine those who had it.

  The book was already on the New York Times list of non-fiction best sellers when the interdict was issued, and an immediate storm of protest assailed the Board of Examiners. For a period of several weeks the storm grew in intensity, as publicists, educators, writers, legal experts, politicians, and spokesmen for various minority groups jumped into the fray on one side or the other. A number of cooler heads among the original supporters of the Horowitz Act tried quietly to persuade the Board to withdraw its interdict, but their initial efforts were fruitless.

  The Board’s dozen examiners had been selected by a White House staffer from the surviving members of the People’s Committee Against Hate, with the obligatory balancing: there were a Catholic bishop, a rabbi, a Protestant minister, a Black civil rights lobbyist, a militant feminist, an American Indian, a Gypsy, a male homosexual activist, and so on. It was the last named examiner who had insisted that the Board act against the AIDS book. He was infuriated by the book’s implication that homosexuals were a health threat to the rest of society and that many of them should be quarantined. He was able to persuade the Black member that Blacks as a whole also were defamed by the book. The feminist, who was rumored to be a switch hitter, was a natural ally. So was the Protestant minister, for the same reason. The four of them steamrollered three other examiners into voting for the interdict, on the basis that the book incited hatred by stigmatizing interracial sex.

  The ruckus finally was settled when the President himself intervened and pressured two of the examiners to change their votes. Before that, however, rowdy demonstrations of homosexuals were occurring on a daily basis outside the New York offices of the book’s publisher, Harmon House. There was an especially nasty incident during the second week of demonstrations, when two of the homosexuals sloshed containers of AIDS-infected blood over a Harmon House secretary as she left her office.

  The next morning there was much more AIDS-infected blood on the sidewalk, when the secretary’s husband pulled his car up to the curb 10 yards from a group of the demonstrators, poked the barrel of a 12-gauge autoloading shotgun out the window, and fired seven loads of No. 4 buckshot into them, then reloaded and fired seven more times.

  Amazingly, while the avenging husband was thumbing fresh cartridges into his shotgun the 30 or so policemen who had been assigned to keep order at the demonstration site failed to intervene. When one rookie assumed a combat stance with his pistol pointed at the man’s head and began shouting for him to drop his weapon, the sergeant in charge knocked the young policeman’s arm aside and spoke words to him that caused him to blush deeply and return his pistol quickly to its holster. The sergeant gestured angrily, with the same effect, at another cop who had drawn a bead on the shotgunner.

  Several of the policemen turned their weapons toward bloodied demonstrators who were attempting to flee and forced them to drop to the pavement where they were, being careful to avoid contact with them. Other fleeing demonstrators tripped over these and went sprawling. The resulting pileups presented easy targets when the shooting resumed a few seconds later.

  After the second barrage the sergeant sighed, ambled over to the car, gently took the man’s shotgun from him, and handcuffed him.

  Five of the sodomites died quietly on the spot, but 11 others screamed and bled for more than an hour, while ambulance crews refused to touch them until special protective suits with gloves and hoods were provided. The New York Times, reflecting the sentiments of the homosexual community, was furious and demanded the prosecution of the policemen, but there was never any serious likelihood of that happening. The official explanation was that the primary responsibility of the police had been to protect the public by preventing the blood-spattered homosexuals from leaving the immediate area of the shooting and possibly infecting others with their blood.

  The public agreed vehemently and almost unanimously, as indicated both by informal polls and by actions. When a homosexual spokesman announced plans for a march to protest police behavior and attitudes, someone firebombed his office. When a dozen of his fellows appeared in front of City Hall with placards, a group of street workers attacked them with pipes and shovels, beating them senseless. The throwing of the contaminated blood on the secretary had caught the public’s imagination in a way the homosexuals themselves could not have imagined; it had awakened a deep horror and revulsion, which would not easily be repressed again by media admonitions against “intolerance.” This was reflected at one level by a sharp rise across the country in the number of assaults on homosexuals by skinheads and others.

  There also were demands that Crossland and Harmon House be charged with conspiring to cause the disturbances in front of the latter’s offices, but nothing came of these demands either.

  There were several official consequences of the affair, however. For one thing, the President quietly reconstituted the Board of Examiners, replacing all of those who had voted for the interdiction of the Crossland book with more pragmatic appointees.

  In Congress the most rabid supporters of the Horowitz Act moved in the opposite direction by introducing new legislation to give the Board a greatly expanded authority. Instead of merely acting on complaints about specific books which already had been published, it would exercise prior censorship; all publishers would be required to submit the texts of new books to the Board for approval before proceeding with publication.

  It is conceivable that before the fuss about Dr. Crossland’s book such legislation might have been enacted, but there was no chance of that now. The spell had been broken. The media-orchestrated hysteria that had allowed the passage of the Horowitz Act in the first place had died down. People had dared to speak out against the heavy-handed censorship of the Board, even at the risk of seeming to favor “hate.” There was no move to roll back the Act or to restore rights to such pariahs as Klansmen and neo-Nazis, but the spell would have to be carefully re-woven before the government would be able to move to ensure that no new books would be published which might offend some favored minority.

  The Horowitz Act supporters did win one victory, though. They succeeded in transferring responsibility for its enforcement from the FBI to the Agency. Their argument was that “hate” literature and “hate” organizations were associated with terrorism and so should come under the Agency’s jurisdiction. They cited the recent shooting of the homosexual demonstrators as a terroristic consequence of the publication of a book which should have been banned. Their real motivation was their anticipation of more vigorous enforcement by Ryan’s Agency than by the FBI.

  XXXII

  “Don’t these fags realize that all of the hatred they’re causing to be built up against them may come boiling out of the public one of these days and scald them all to death? Do they really think they can keep rubbing the average guy’s nose in their filth indefinitely, and there’ll never be any payback?” Oscar asked.

  He, Harry, and Saul were in the Kellers’ recreation room having another Sunday-afternoon planning session for Saul’s program. For the last ten weeks Saul had been delivering consciousness-raising sermons, very carefully designing them to embody a racial message without actually mentioning race. The viewers received the message surprisingly well, and his ratings were continuing to rise. Two Sundays after the latest Nielsen ratings were announced, showing that Saul’s share of the Fundamentalist audience had risen to 55 per cent, Caldwell, Braggart, and Richards simultaneously accused Saul of being a “racist�
� and denounced his sermons as “un-Christian” and “divisive.”

  Saul, of course, vehemently denied the charges and kept his sermons right on course. The week after he was attacked he had given his most daring sermon yet, beginning with the Old Testament account of Ezra’s measures to keep his fellow Jews from intermarrying with their Gentile neighbors and finishing with an admonition to his audience not to undo what Jehovah had so carefully done: “God didn’t spend a thousand generations to make you what you are, just for you to mess it all up. He wants me to tell you the same thing today he had Ezra tell the Israelites 1,500 years ago. He made them get rid of all their ‘strange wives’ and of the children they had by those wives too. If they weren’t pure-blooded Israelites they had to go. That’s what God wanted. You young people, think about what your parents and your grandparents are like. Think about the way they look and act, and then you pick yourself a mate who looks and acts that way too.” And still there was no explicit mention of race. Saul could have just as well been speaking to a Black audience as a White one. The controversy resulting from the attack by his fellow evangelists caused his ratings to shoot even higher.

  Oscar’s comment about homosexuals stemmed from a discussion they were having of a news item in that day’s Washington Post. The National Education Association had just endorsed a model bill which would require the schools in those states where the bill became law to have a course titled “Alternative Sexual Orientations” for all students. The purported purpose of the bill, which had been drawn up by a coalition of homosexual groups working with the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, would be to “combat bigotry” and reduce the likelihood of further “tragedies” like the recent sidewalk slaughter in New York. The course of study outlined in the bill would “help young people understand that persons with a sexual orientation different from their own” are just as “normal” as anyone else, and that no specific “orientation” is more moral or more desirable than any other.