Although her initial contact was with George, Katherine has never been emotionally or romantically involved with him. When they first met, George was still married. Later, after George's wife, who never approved of his work for the Organization, had left him and Katherine had joined the Organization, they were both too busy in different departments for much contact. George, in fact, whose work as a fund raiser and roving organizer kept him on the road, wasn't really around Washington much.
It is only a coincidence that George and Katherine were assigned to this unit together, but George pretty obviously feels a proprietary interest in her. Although Katherine never did or said anything to support my assumption, until this morning I had taken it for granted from George's behavior toward her that there was at least a tentative relationship between them.
Since George is nominally our unit leader, I have heretofore kept my natural attraction toward Katherine under control. Now I'm afraid that the situation has become a bit awkward. If George is unable to adjust graciously to it, things will be strained and may only by resolved by some personnel transfers between our unit and others in the area.
For the time being, however, there are other problems to worry about-big ones! When George and Henry finally got back this evening, we found out what they'd been doing all day: casing the FBI's national headquarters downtown. Our unit has been assigned the task of blowing it up!
The initial order came all the way down from Revolutionary Command, and a man was sent from the Eastern Command Center to the WFC briefing George attended Sunday to look over the local unit leaders and pick one for this assignment.
Apparently Revolutionary Command has decided to take the offensive against the political police before they arrest too many more of our "legals" or finish setting up their computerized passport system.
George was given the word after he was summoned by WFC for a second briefing yesterday. A man from Unit 8 was also at yesterday's briefing. Unit 8 will be assisting us.
The plan, roughly, is this: Unit 8 will secure a large quantity of explosives-between five and ten tons. Our unit will hijack a truck making a legitimate delivery to the FBI headquarters, rendezvous at a location where Unit 8 will be waiting with the explosives, and switch loads. We will then drive into the FBI building's freight-receiving area, set the fuse, and leave the truck.
While Unit 8 is solving the problem of the explosives, we have to work out all the other details of the assignment, including a determination of the FBI's freight-delivery schedules and procedures. We have been given a ten-day deadline.
My job will be the design and construction of the mechanism of the bomb itself.
Chapter V
October 3, 1991. I've been breaking up my work on the FBI project with some handyman activity around our building. Last night I finished our perimeter-alarm system, and today I did some rough and very dirty work on our emergency escape tunnel.
Along both sides and the back of the building I buried a row of pressure-sensitive pads, which are wired to a light and an alarm buzzer inside. The pads are the sort which are often installed under doormats inside stores to signal the arrival of a customer They consist of two-foot-long metal strips sealed inside a flexible plastic sheet, and they are waterproof. Covered with an inch of soil they are undetectable, but they will signal us if anyone steps on the ground above them.
This method could not be used in front of our building, because nearly all the ground there is covered by the concrete driveway and parking area. After considering and rejecting an ultrasonic detector for the front, I settled on a photoelectric beam between two steel fence posts on either side of the concrete area.
In order to keep the light source and photocell unnoticeable, it was necessary to place them inside the fence post on one side, with a very small and inconspicuous reflector mounted on the other. I had to drill several holes in one post, and quite a bit of tinkering was necessary to make everything work properly.
Katherine was a big help with this, carefully adjusting the reflector while I lined up the light and photocell. It was also at her suggestion that I changed the alarm system inside the building, so that it not only warns us at the instant an intruder steps on one of the pressure-sensitive pads or interrupts the light beam, but it also turns on an electric clock in the garage. This way we will know whether someone has been around while we were all out of the building-and we will know when.
In cleaning out a filthy collection of empty oil cans, greasy rags, and miscellaneous trash from the service pit which had been used for changing oil and working underneath automobiles in the garage, we discovered that the service pit opens directly into a storm sewer through a steel grating in the concrete floor.
Prying up the grating, we found that it is possible to crawl into the storm sewer, which is a concrete pipe four feet in diameter. The pipe runs about 400 yards to a large, open drainage ditch. Along the way there are about a dozen smaller pipes emptying into the main conduit, apparently from street drains. The open end of the sewer is protected by a grating of half-inch reinforcing rods set into the concrete.
Today I took a hacksaw, scuttled down to the end of the sewer, and sawed through all but two of the steel rods. This left the grating firmly in place but made it possible, with a great deal of effort, to bend it aside far enough to crawl out.
I did so and took a brief look around. The side of the ditch is heavily overgrown, providing good concealment from the nearby road. And from the road it is not possible to see our building or any part of the street on which it fronts, because of intervening structures. When I reentered the sewer, I grunted and strained until I had bent the grating back in place again.
Unfortunately, the people who ran the garage and machine shop before we moved in must have been dumping all their waste oil into the storm sewer for years, because there's about four inches of thick, black sludge along the bottom of the sewer pipe near the opening from the service pit. When I crawled out into the shop again I was covered with the stuff.
Henry and George were both out, and Katherine made me strip and hosed me down in the service pit before she would even let me go upstairs to take a shower. She declared the shoes and clothes I had been wearing a total loss and threw them out.
Every time I take an ice-cold shower I bitterly regret that Henry and I didn't take the time to add hot water to our makeshift shower stall.
October 6. Today I completed the detonating mechanism for the bomb we'll use against the FBI building. The trigger mechanism itself was quite easy, but I was held up on the booster until yesterday, because I didn't know what sort of explosives we would be using.
The people in Unit 8 had planned to raid a supply shed in one of the areas where the Washington subway system is being extended, but they didn't have any luck at all until yesterday- and then not much. They were only able to steal two cases of blasting gelatin, and one case wasn't even full. Less than 100 pounds.
But that solved my problem, at least. The blasting gelatin is sensitive enough to be initiated by one of my homemade lead azide detonators, and 100 pounds of it will be more than sufficient to detonate the main charge, when and if Unit 8 finds more explosives, regardless of what they are or how they are packaged.
I packed about four pounds of the blasting gelatin into an empty applesauce can, primed it, placed the batteries and timing mechanism in the top of the can, and wired them to a small toggle switch on the end of a 20-foot extension cord. When we load the truck with explosives, the can will go in back, on top of the two cases of blasting gelatin. We'll have to poke small holes in the walls of the trailer and the cab to run the extension cord and the switch into the cab.
Either George or Henry-probably Henry-will drive the truck into the freight-receiving area inside the FBI building. Before he gets out of the cab he will flip the switch, starting the timer. Ten minutes later the explosives will go off. If we're lucky, that will be the end of the FBI building-and the government's new three-billion-dollar computer complex for t
heir internal-passport system.
Six or seven years ago, when they first started releasing "trial balloons" to see what the public reaction to the new passport system would be, it was said that its main purpose would be to detect illegal aliens, so they could be deported.
Although some citizens were properly suspicious of the whole scheme, most swallowed the government's explanation of why the passports were needed. Thus, many labor union members, who saw illegal aliens as a threat to their jobs during a time of high unemployment, thought it was a fine idea, while liberals generally opposed it because it sounded "racist"-illegal aliens being virtually all non-White. Later, when the government granted automatic citizenship to everyone who had managed to sneak across the Mexican border and remain in the country for two years, the liberal opposition evaporated-except for a hard core of libertarians who were still suspicious.
All in all, it has been depressingly easy for the System to deceive and manipulate the American people-whether the relatively naive "conservatives" or the spoiled and pseudo-sophisticated "liberals." Even the libertarians, inherently hostile to all government, will be intimidated into going along when Big Brother announces that the new passport system is necessary to find and root out "racists"-namely, us.
If the freedom of the American people were the only thing at stake, the existence of the Organization would hardly be justified. Americans have lost their right to be free. Slavery is the just and proper state for a people who have grown as soft, self-indulgent, careless, credulous, and befuddled as we have.
Indeed, we are already slaves. We have allowed a diabolically clever, alien minority to put chains on our souls and our minds. These spiritual chains are a truer mark of slavery than the iron chains which are yet to come.
Why didn't we rebel 35 years ago, when they took our schools away from us and began converting them into racially mixed jungles? Why didn't we throw them all out of the country 50 years ago, instead of letting them use us as cannon fodder in their war to subjugate Europe?
More to the point, why didn't we rise up three years ago, when they started taking our guns away? Why didn't we rise up in righteous fury and drag these arrogant aliens into the streets and cut their throats then? Why didn't we roast them over bonfires at every street-corner in America? Why didn't we make a final end to this obnoxious and eternally pushy clan, this pestilence from the sewers of the East, instead of meekly allowing ourselves to be disarmed?
The answer is easy. We would have rebelled if all that has been imposed on us in the last 50 years had been attempted at once. But because the chains that bind us were forged imperceptibly, link by link, we submitted.
The adding of any single, new link to the chain was never enough for us to make a big fuss about. It always seemed easier -and safer-to go along. And the further we went, the easier it was to go just one step further.
One thing the historians will have to decide-if any men of our race survive to write a history of this era-is the relative importance of deliberation and inadvertence in converting us from a society of free men to a herd of human cattle.
That is, can we justly blame what has happened to us entirely on deliberate subversion, carried out through the insidious propaganda of the controlled mass media, the schools, the churches, and the government? Or must we place a large share of the blame on inadvertent decadence - on the spiritually debilitating life style into which the Western people have allowed themselves to slip in the twentieth century?
Probably the two things are intertwined, and it will be difficult to blame either cause separately. Brainwashing has made decadence more acceptable to us, and decadence has made us less resistant to brainwashing. In any event, we are too close to the trees now to see the outline of the forest very clearly.
But one thing which is quite clear is that much more than our freedom is at stake. If the Organization fails in its task now, everything will be lost-our history, our heritage, all the blood and sacrifices and upward striving of countless thousands of years. The Enemy we are fighting fully intends to destroy the racial basis of our existence.
No excuse for our failure will have any meaning, for there will be only a swarming horde of indifferent, mulatto zombies to hear it. There will be no White men to remember us-either to blame us for our weakness or to forgive us for our folly.
If we fail, God's great Experiment will come to an end, and this planet will once again, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of higher man.
October 11. Tomorrow is the day! Despite the failure of Unit 8 to find as much explosives as we want, we are going ahead with the FBI operation.
The final decision on this came late this afternoon in a conference at Unit 8's headquarters. Henry and I were both there, as well as a staff officer from Revolutionary Command- an indication of the urgency with which the Organization's leadership views this operation.
Ordinarily Revolutionary Command personnel do not become involved with unit actions on an operational level. We receive operational orders from and report to Washington Field Command, with representatives from the Eastern Command Center participating occasionally in conferences when matters of special importance must be decided. Only twice previously have I attended meetings with anyone from Revolutionary Command, both times to make basic decisions concerning the Organization's communications equipment, which I was designing. And that, of course, was before we went underground.
So the presence of Major Williams (a pseudonym, I believe) at our meeting this afternoon made a strong impression on all of us. I was asked to attend because I am responsible for the proper functioning of the bomb. Henry was there because he will be delivering it.
And the reason for the meeting was Unit 8's failure to obtain what I and Ed Sanders estimate to be the minimum quantity of explosives needed to do a thorough job. Ed is Unit 8's ordnance expert-and, interestingly enough, a former special agent of the FBI who is familiar with the structure and layout of the FBI building.
As carefully as we could, we calculated that we should have at least 10,000 pounds of TNT or an equivalent explosive to destroy a substantial portion of the building and wreck the new computer center in the sub-basement. To be on the safe side, we asked for 20,000 pounds. Instead, what we have is a little under 5,000 pounds, and nearly all of that is ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which is much less effective than TNT for our purpose.
After the initial two cases of blasting gelatin, Unit 8 was able to pick up 400 pounds of dynamite from another subway construction shed. We have given up hope of assembling the necessary quantity of explosives in this way, however. Although large quantities of explosives are used each day on the subway, it is stored in small batches and access is very difficult. Two of Unit 8's people had a close call when they swiped the dynamite.
Last Thursday, with our deadline for completing the job upon us, three men from Unit 8 made a night raid on a farm-supply warehouse near Fredericksburg, about 50 miles south of here. They found no explosives, as such, but did find some ammonium nitrate, which they cleaned out: forty-four 100-lb. bags of the stuff.
Sensitized with oil and tightly confined, it makes an effective blasting agent, where the aim is simply to move a quantity of dirt or rock. But our original plan for the bomb called for it to be essentially unconfined and to be able to punch through two levels of reinforced-concrete flooring while producing an open-air blast wave powerful enough to blow the facade off a massive and strongly constructed building.
Finally, two days ago, Unit 8 set about doing what it should have done at the beginning. The same three fellows who had gotten the ammonium nitrate headed up into Maryland with their truck to rob a military arsenal. I gather from what Ed Sanders says that we have a legal on the inside there who will be able to help.
But, as of this afternoon, there has been no word from them, and Revolutionary Command isn't willing to wait any longer. The pros and cons of going ahead with what we have now are these:
The System is hurting us badly
by continuing to arrest our legals, upon whom the Organization is largely dependent for its financing. If the supply of funds from our legals is cut off, our underground units will be forced to turn to robbery on a large scale in order to support themselves.
Thus, Revolutionary Command feels it is essential to strike the System immediately with a blow which will not only interrupt the FBI roundup of our legals, at least temporarily, but will also raise morale throughout the Organization by embarrassing the System and demonstrating our ability to act. From what Williams said, I gather that these two goals have become even more pressing than the original objective of knocking out the computer bank.
On the other hand, if we strike a blow which does not do some real damage to the System's secret police we may not only fail to achieve these new goals but, by forewarning the enemy of our intentions and tactics, also make it much more difficult to hit the computers later. This was the viewpoint expressed by Henry, whose great gift is his ability to always keep a cool head and not be distracted from future goals by immediate difficulties. But he is also a good soldier and is completely willing to carry through with his part of tomorrow's action, despite his feeling that we should hold off until we are certain that we can do a thorough job.
I believe the people in Revolutionary Command also understand the danger in hasty, premature action. But they must take into consideration many factors which we cannot. Williams is clearly convinced that it is imperative to throw a monkey wrench into the FBI's gears immediately, otherwise they will flatten us like a steamroller. Thus, most of our discussion this afternoon centered on the narrow question of just how much damage we can do with our present quantity of explosives.
If, in accord with our original plan, we drive a truck into the main freight entrance of the FBI building and blow it up in the freight-receiving area, the explosion will take place in a large, central courtyard, surrounded on all sides by heavy masonry and open to the sky above. Ed and I both agree that with the present quantity of explosives we will not be able to do any really serious structural damage under those conditions.
The Turner Diaries: A Novel Page 5