The Hill of the Ravens

by H. A. Covington

  “Not a clue,” said Leach in a sour voice, shaking his head. “I wasn’t an officer of any kind at that time, just a grunt Volunteer. I did what I was told. I was called into the conference in the living room of the safe house by Commandant Murdock to get my assignment, oh, it must have been about one in the morning. I didn’t say much, nothing to say, really. Cord and Trudy Greiner were already there, and we had a few words about aid station procedure. Nothing unusual. The two of them gave Commandant Murdock a rundown of the available medical supplies we had on hand, what vehicles they said they’d be using, so forth and so on. Greiner told Cord and the Commandant she’d be at the aid station at seven sharp. She said she’d let herself into the storeroom. Apparently at some point before I came in, she had been given a set of keys to the Burger Boy. The manager was one of us, like I said.”

  “Meet you there? She wasn’t going to accompany Volunteer

  Cord and you to the station?” asked Redmond keenly. “That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” growled Leach.

  “Any idea where she was going, why she separated from the rest of the Column?”

  “None,” Leach replied. “I always assumed that she wangled some assignment from Murdock to give her an excuse to cut out on us and get away and then rat us out, but whatever it was, nothing was said in my presence. Like I told you, I was just an AB in those days. They told me to stick with Cord and make sure he and Greiner were able to do what they could for any wounded that showed up without any interruption. If Fattie came down on us I did the shooting while they did the packing up and running, if they could. Hey, they were

  both more valuable ratings in the crew than I was, and I understood that I was more expendable. It didn’t bother me. I got my orders, then I left to rack in for a few hours in a bedroll out back in the woods, before me and Joe Cord moved out in separate vehicles for Poulsbo on our part of the mission. He followed me. That was the last time I saw the Greiner woman, when I left that house at one thirty or so in the morning.”

  “We have been reliably informed that the FATPO commander Coleman got the call from the informant at a little after two A. M.,” said Redmond thoughtfully, drumming his fingers on his knee. “You didn’t see Trudy Greiner leave?”

  “No, I did not,” said Leach.

  “You said Trudy Greiner was supposed to be driving one of the NVA vans as a makeshift ambulance. Was she given the van then?”

  “Mmmm…well, like I said, I didn’t see her go but I did see her arrive, in a car. Seems to me it was a Toyota or some Japanese car. Why?” asked Leach.

  “No real reason,” sighed Redmond. “I’m just trawling through the waters of the past, Admiral, trying to see what comes up in my net. For example, I would like to learn whether or not it was common knowledge that Tom Murdock was an Odinist, a follower of the Old Gods of Norse mythology as many of our fellow citizens in the Republic are. Did you know this? And if so, did this create any friction?”

  “News to me,” said Leach, to all appearances genuinely surprised. “Not that I ever gave a damn. I always thought this whole religion thing was a canard, a distraction. That’s what always bugged me about people like Joe Cord, and what bugs me about people like that even today. Religion isn’t important. Race is important. Not to knock our Christian comrades, and I know that the Christian Identity people are some of our best citizens, not to mention our best soldiers. Always were. God knows I’ve commanded enough of them. But I’ve always had this little bugbear in the back of my mind about Christianity. There’s Jesus and then there’s Jeeee-zus. I’ve always had this suspicion that if and when the chips come down, Christians will choose Jeeee-zus over their race. You remember what the Old Man said about it.”

  “Yes, I remember,” said Redmond. “Although actually it was Commander Rockwell who said it originally. Christianity has one great weakness, and that is that it is a community of faith rather than of blood, and a Christian may be tempted to choose a monkoid who believes in Jeeee-zus over a white man who doesn’t. Which defect the Christian Identity faith answers quite neatly, in my opinion.”

  “Does any of this sound to you like she didn’t do it?”

  demanded Leach.

  “Admiral, I’m not sure that at this remove in time it’s going to be possible to determine just what the hell happened,” sighed Redmond. “There is something else I need to ask you about. Statistically, something like twenty per cent of the Volunteers of the NVA were female, and every NVA unit or cell had its relationships, ranging from Christian marriages to outright gang-bang promiscuity, and everything in between. It has been suggested to us that Trudy Greiner was involved with Tom Murdock before he and Melanie Young, er, became an item, so to speak.”

  “Yeah, she was,” agreed Leach. “It wasn’t something anybody ever got up and announced over the campfire, but you usually had a pretty good idea which female comrades were giving it to whom. You’re wearing the ribbon, you ought to know.”

  “I was a bit young to pick up on such things,” said Redmond. “Yeah, Murdock broke it off with Trudy when he and Mel

  started getting it on. You’re not the first to suggest that might have been part of Trude’s motive in doing what she did.”

  “Was there ever any open bad blood or emotional tension between the three of them, any obvious lover’s triangle type aggro?” asked Redmond.

  “Mmmm…not that I recall. Not that I saw or heard,” replied Leach judiciously, absently scratching his bearded chin. “But I repeat, Colonel, at that time I was just a lowly gunner’s mate. I wasn’t too often in a position to see or hear things like that. Sorry, that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Redmond. He rose to go and Nel stood up with him. “You have been very helpful.”

  “Why do all the older people in the Republic swear like that?”

  asked Nel with a scowl as they left the building.

  “Most of them don’t even notice they’re doing it. They grew up around niggers and a lot of niggerism rubbed off on them. Fifty years ago, that was the American dialect. You’ll get eighty year-old NVA vets who call one another dude and dawg and ask whuzzup? The older people who grew up in the United States are a lot raunchier about sex as well. We’re probably the only nation on earth where grandmothers shock and scandalize their granddaughters at the dinner table. I think that’s one of the reasons the Ministry of Culture is trying to get everybody back into Victorian days dress-wise. Hopefully the old mores will revive along with Picadilly weepers and high lace necklines.”

  “Sounds like this Oglevy was a bit of a nutter,” remarked Nel. “Yes, but he was our nutter,” agreed Redmond. “As much as I

  despise Oglevy and that part of our past, I have to admit that we owe the son of a bitch a lot. You know that right after Longview, before Oglevy was killed, a dissident faction of the Feds refused to release the Old Man from Florence Federal prison in Colorado? John Corbett and Pat Brennan got on the horn to the Colorado military governor. They told him they were sending a plane down, and it had damned well better come back to Olympia with the Old Man on board, because if it didn’t the next guy they sent down to collect him would be O. C. Oglevy. They handed the Old Man over when our people pulled up to the prison gate.”

  “Who’s next on our list?” asked Nel.

  “One of the good things about working for BOSS is you get to meet all kinds of interesting people. Ever rousted a Cabinet minister before, Hennie? Frank Palmieri. Let’s grab a bite of lunch and back down to Oly, to the Ministry of Transport.”

  * * *

  Redmond and Nel were expected at the Ministry offices on Fifth Street, and they were shown up to the sanctum sanctorum of the department on the third floor. Transportation Minister Frank Palmieri was a stocky, jocose man in a simple shirt and cravat, with a fringe of white hair around his balding head, muscular white-hairy arms and a generous paunch. He looked like an avuncular grandfather. He shook

  their hands warmly. “Always glad to cooperate with BOSS,
” said the technocrat. “Have a seat, gentlemen.”

  “It is an honor to meet you. Minister. Your accomplishments for the Republic are well known,” said Redmond.

  “Not just mine, Colonel. They are the accomplishments of an entire nation that refuses to be beaten down!” said Palmieri proudly and sincerely. “For over a generation the Americans and the whole damned outside world besides have tried to strangle us. A year after the Longview treaty Chelsea Clinton boasted that in another year all us evil old racists would be eating tree bark and walking or riding in ox wagons, they’d clamp the sanctions down so tight. Instead we have perfected the alcohol engine, the electric engine, and for heavy work the methane engine. Haven’t imported a drop of oil into the Northwest American Republic for a decade now! No need to. We run our whole economy on pig shit. In spite of every economic sanction the Americans and the rest of the world have imposed on us, we now have the greatest public transportation system in the world. Every town in the Republic over 40,000 people has a light rail system of some description for five pence a ride, and in every major city there are subways, tramcars and crosstown copter shuttle. Our highways are solid and capacious while traffic jams are a thing of the past. If you don’t feel like flying over it in an aircar, you can drive down Old I-5 in an electric vehicle at ninety miles an hour with your car on cruise control and autopilot, sit back and conduct a conversation with a passenger in the car in the next lane beside you, without raising your voice. We get delegations of engineers and urban planners every year who come to study the Seattle and Portland and Boise subways.”

  “Of course, it helps when white people can ride public transportation without being robbed, raped, and murdered by mud-colored criminals,” pointed out Redmond.

  “Yes. That was always the biggest problem with public transportation in the States, back in the old days. The Americans solved that problem after the revolution by forcibly relocating most of their rural white population into the metroplexes, outlawing almost all private automobiles and forcing people onto overcrowded petroleum-burning trains and buses like cattle. I always considered that a feather in our cap, that we were able to get white people to give up their cars on most occasions and ride on buses and trains and planes and copters

  and packet boats, voluntarily and enthusiastically. The Americans had to use force. The environmental damage done by concentrated petroleum exhaust fumes was known as early as the 1950s, yet white people clung to their pollution-spewing automobiles because they were terrified to set foot on a bus. That, and the idiots destroyed their own railroad system at the behest of the big oil conglomerates who wanted all those monstrous diesel-burning semis on the roads. Our own railroads carry over ninety percent of the freight in the Republic. No more of those 18-wheel behemoths that have destroyed every highway in the United States. Northwest Air Service has hundreds of flights every day and we haven’t had a fatality in twenty-one years now. You name me two places, a beginning and an end, anywhere from a single apartment in Seattle to the most remote mountain reaches of Wyoming. Give me a few minutes on my com, and I will quote you a fare that within twelve hours max will put you within a hundred feet of that destination. Okay, maybe a few hundred feet where Wyoming is concerned.”

  “Is that a Wyoming joke, Mr. Secretary?” asked Redmond

  tiredly.

  “Hardly,” said Palmieri with a grin. “Seeing as how I’m from

  Wyoming myself. I grew up as the only Italian kid in that godforsaken place called Laramie.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, and no, that wasn’t a Wyoming joke. Wyoming is one of the most beautiful parts of our Homeland, and I would like to point out that I and family take our vacation there regularly…”

  Palmieri laughed. “So some of your best friends are from Wyoming? Look, Colonel, don’t sweat it. Every country on earth has its own little internal minorities they make jokes about, Kerrymen among the Irish, Georgians among the Russians, whatever. That’s jake with us. That big sky we live under back home more than makes up for any unkindness from our fellow white folks. We know we got something they ain’t got, and it’s worth a few jokes. If my job didn’t keep me here I’d be back in Jackson Hole tomorrow. Now what can I do for you?”

  “Sir, Sergeant Nel and I are conducting a rather strange investigation, and I am going to have to go about this in a rather roundabout way. Please bear with me; this may take some time.”

  “Sure,” said Palmieri, puzzled.

  “This has to do with things that occurred many years ago. Before we get into that, I’d like to get some personal background, please, Minister,” said Redmond. “Background on yourself. How you got involved with the revolution? This isn’t just official. I have to admit that this is a hobby of mine, learning how the men and women of your generation actually made the decision to live for something other than their own personal lusts and desires.”

  “Jesus, where can I start?” asked Palmieri, puzzled yet willing. “Why not start at the beginning” asked Redmond.

  “All the way back to the beginning? All right. My Dad was born in New York. He left high school when his own dad, my grandfather, dropped dead of a heart attack while laying carpet in some rich Jew’s condo. My pop was a working man all his life, the ultimate blue-collar patriarch. Big man with short black hair and a beer belly, but over that belly were equally bulging chest and arm muscles. He had no engineering degree, but when it came to building roads and bridges, Sal Palmieri told the engineers how it was done. He came out to Wyoming with a highway contractor on a summer job that was supposed to last three months. He thought it was the total pits.

  “Then he met a girl named Gina Yates. My mom. All of a sudden Wyoming was the only place on earth he ever wanted to be. Dad settled down in Laramie. He was a Federal employee, ironically enough, although that didn’t save us from It Takes A Village when the time came. Mom was a born-again fundamentalist, and Dad converted to her church and got baptized before she’d marry him. Officially, anyway. He told me once when I was a kid that he didn’t believe a damned word of it, and despite that he’d never regretted a day his life with my mother. Dad just kind of went along with church and Jesus and all, but Mom was a dyed in the wool believer. I don’t mean one of the crabby tub-thumping types. My mother was one of the kind of born-againers who honestly believed that God is love and Jesus wanted everyone to be joyful. We had a big family. I was the second of eight. I didn’t realize it then, but that already marked us as suspicious in the eyes of the authorities. White couples weren’t supposed to have a lot of white babies, they were supposed to adopt orphaned gooks from Korea or whatever. Large families of white kids

  indicated that someone wasn’t getting with the program. Fundamentalists are supposed to be big on the spare the rod and spoil the child thing, but it wasn’t like that. Neither Mom nor Dad ever raised a hand against any of us. They didn’t have to. None of us would have so much as thought about crossing Dad. Believe me, that didn’t happen. If one of us kids was in a bad mood and giving Mom problems, the rest of us would pile on the offender and straighten him or her out toot sweet. I had a great childhood, for a while there.”

  “What happened?” asked Redmond.

  “Hatecrime happened,” recalled Palmieri grimly. “What else, in those days? I was ten years old when Federal Child Protective Services came for me and for my brothers and sisters. You know that they created a whole Federal agency, complete with SWAT teams, whose purpose was to take white children out of what they termed unsuitable homes. They called it the It Takes A Village program after a book that vile bitch Hillary Clinton wrote.”

  “Yes, I know. Oddly enough, I was reviewing that bit of our history with my daughter just the other evening,” said Redmond. “I almost was taken myself when I was six. My uncle and aunt had to more or less smuggle me Home to the Northwest.”

  “Yeah, well, make sure your girl learns that chapter in her history book real good,” said Palmieri bitterly. “My family was one of their first victims. It wa
s just like the 10/22 situation with the Singers, but Laramie wasn’t Coeur d’Alene. Our neighbors just stood by cowering and watched while it happened. So much for the cowboy heritage. One of those neighbors was a typical village busybody woman. She turned my mother in for the reward. She called the Federal Child Protective Services and reported my Mom for teaching us hate and giving us homophobic literature to read. I made damned sure the hunters tracked the old bag down later. They finally found her in an old folks’ home in Cincinnati eighteen years ago and cut her throat. They sent me a photo. I went back to Laramie for the first time since it happened, and I buried that photo between the headstones of my mother and father. I go back every year since then, but never before that. I couldn’t go to my parents’ grave empty-handed. You’re not Italian so you wouldn’t understand that.”

  “My aunt is Tori Stoppaglia, and I am a long time personal friend of Major General William Vitale, so yes, Minister, I would

  understand that. What was the homophobic literature your mother allegedly gave you?” asked Redmond.

  “Mom was teaching us in our little Sunday school from a King James Bible,” said Palmieri. “I didn’t know then, but I’ve made it a point to learn some history, and there were some Federal court rulings to the effect that the King James version contained homophobia, the book of Leviticus and all. You know how they were in those days, all the ways those bastards in Washington took away the freedom of white people in general and Christians in particular. They created situations where you could exist, but you couldn’t function. The true Scripture wasn’t legally banned, oh, no, can’t do that under the First Amendment. But if you used a King James instead of what they called the ‘inclusive’ version of the Scripture, you could be sued in civil court, which was immune from what little was left of constitutional safeguards. Or you could be hauled up in front of a Human Rights Tribunal and you could lose your children to the state based on an administrative decree that bypassed the courts and legal system.”