We knew the fat was really in the fire; we were in the middle of a nuclear civil war, and within the next few days the fate of the planet would be decided for all time. Now it was either the Jews or the White race, and everyone knew the game was for keeps.
I still haven't figured out all the details of our strategy leading up to the ultimatum. I don't know why, for example, Miami and Charleston were chosen as initial targets-although I've heard a rumor that the rich Jews who were evacuated from New York were being temporarily housed in the Charleston area, and Miami, of course, already had a superabundance of Jews. But why not take out the New York City area instead, with its two-and-a-half megakikes? Perhaps our bombs weren't really in place yet in New York, despite what our ultimatum said.
And I'm also not sure why our ultimatum took the particular form it did: all stick and no carrot. Perhaps it was deliberately intended to stampede the cattle-which, indeed, it has. Or perhaps there were some under-the-table communications between Revolutionary Command and the System's military leaders which determined the form of the ultimatum. In any event, it has had the effect of splitting the System right down the middle. The Jews and nearly all the politicians are in one faction, and nearly all the military leaders are in another faction.
The Jewish faction is demanding the immediate nuclear annihilation of California, regardless of the consequences. The accursed goyim have raised their hands against the Chosen People and must be destroyed at any cost. The military faction, on the other hand, is in favor of a temporary truce, while an effort is made to find our "500 (a forgivable exaggeration) nuclear devices" and disarm them.
After hearing that broadcast our only thought was to get our deadly cargo to Washington as soon as possible. We knew everyone would be off balance for a while as a result of what had just happened, and we decided to take advantage of the general confusion by converting our truck into an emergency vehicle and barrelling straight down the highway toward our destination. We didn't have a siren, but we did have flashing red lights front and rear, and we completed the conversion a few minutes later by stopping in a rural hardware store and buying some cans of spray paint which, with some hastily improvised stencils made from torn newspapers, we used to paint Red Cross symbols in the appropriate places on our truck.
After that, we made Washington in less than 20 hours, despite the chaotic conditions on the highways. We sped along shoulders to get past stalled traffic, drove on the wrong side of the road with horn blaring and lights flashing, bounced over culverts and open fields to get around blocked intersections, and generally ignored all traffic controllers, bluffing our way through more than a dozen checkpoints.
Our first bomb went into Fort Belvoir, the big Army base just south of Washington where I was locked up for more than a year. We had to wait two maddening days to make contact with our inside man there so we could arrange to get the bomb inside the base and hidden in the right area.
"Rodriguez" went over the fence with the bomb strapped on his back. I received a radio signal from him the next day, confirming the successful completion of his mission. Meanwhile, the rest of us planted a second bomb in the District of Columbia, where it will be able to take out a couple of hundred thousand Blacks when it goes, not to mention a few government agencies and a critical portion of the capital's transportation network.
I didn't have my final orders on the third bomb until this afternoon. That will go into the Silver Spring area north of here - the center of the Maryland-suburban Jewish community. The fourth one is intended for the Pentagon, but security is so tight there I still haven't figured a way to get it anywhere near the place.
I must confess that my mind has not been exclusively on my work since I've been back here. Katherine and I have stolen time from our Organization responsibilities to be together. Neither of us had realized how much we have come to mean to each other until we were separated again this summer, so soon after my escape from prison. In the month we were together this spring, before I was sent to Texas and then to Colorado and finally to California, we became as close as any two people can possibly be.
Things have been hard for Katherine and the others here while I was gone, especially since July 4. They have been under enormous pressure from two directions. The Organization has been pushing them without mercy to continually step up their level of activism, while the danger of being caught by the political police has grown worse every week.
The System is resorting to new methods in its fight against us: massive, house-to-house searches of multi-block areas; astronomical rewards for informers; much tighter controls on all civilian movement. In many other parts of the country these repressive measures have been more sporadic, and they have broken down entirely in those areas where the System has not been able to maintain public order-especially since the panic caused by the bombings of Miami and Charleston. But around Washington the System still has things in a very tight grip, and it's tough.
Late this afternoon Katherine and I slipped out of the shop for a couple of hours and went for a walk. We strolled by several groups of soldiers in sandbagged machine-gun emplacements outside office buildings; on past the smoke-blackened rubble of a suburban subway station in which Katherine herself had planted a dynamite bomb just two weeks ago; through a park-like area where a loudspeaker mounted high on a lamppost was blaring out exhortations to "all right-thinking citizens" to immediately report to the political police the slightest manifestation of racism on the part of their neighbors or co-workers; and out onto one of the main highway bridges across the Potomac River from Virginia to the District of Columbia. There was no traffic on the bridge because it ended abruptly 50 yards from the Virginia shore, in a tangle of shattered concrete and twisted reinforcing rods. The Organization had blown it up in July, and no effort had yet been made to repair it.
It was fairly quiet there at the end of the bridge, with only the screaming of police sirens in the distance and the occasional clatter of a police helicopter swooping overhead. We talked, we embraced, and we silently surveyed the scene around us as the sun went down. We and our companions have certainly made an influence on the world in the last few months-both on the suburban world of ordinary White people on the Virginia side of the bridge and on the System's world of bustling government offices on the other side. And yet the System is all too evidently still alive all around us. What a contrast with the situation in California!
Katherine was full of questions about what life is like in the liberated zone, and I tried to tell her as best I could, but I am afraid that mere words are inadequate for expressing the difference between the way I felt in California and the way I feel here. It is more a spiritual thing than merely a difference in the political and social environments.
As we stood there talking above the swirling eddies at the end of the bridge, our bodies pressed together, the world growing dark around us, a group of young Negroes came out onto the other stump of the bridge, from the Washington side. They began horsing around in typical Negro fashion, a couple of them urinating into the river. Finally one of them spotted us, and they all began shouting and making obscene gestures. For me, at least, that accentuated the difference which I could not find words to express.
Chapter XXVI
September 18, 1993. So much has happened, so much has been lost in these last two weeks, I can hardly force myself to begin writing about it. I am alive and in good health, yet there are moments when I envy the tens of millions who have died in recent days. My soul has dried up inside me; I am like a walking dead man.
All that I have been able to think about-all that has been running through my mind, over and over again-is the single, overwhelming fact: Katherine is gone! Before today, when I was not absolutely certain of her fate, that fact tormented me and gave me no rest. Now that I know she is dead, however, the torment is gone, and I merely feel a great emptiness, an irreplaceable loss.
There is important work for me to do, and I know that I must now put the past out of my mind and
get on with it. But tonight I must record my memories, my thoughts. In the chaos of these days, millions perish without leaving a ripple behind-they will be forever unremembered, forever nameless-but I can at least commit to these flimsy pages my memory of Katherine and the events which she and our other comrades have helped to shape and hope that my diary outlives me. That, at least, we owe to our dead, to our martyrs: that we do not forget them or their deeds.
It was September 7, a Wednesday, that I finished installing our third bomb. I and two other members of our bomb team picked it up Monday from the hiding place where the last warhead is still stashed, and we took it to Maryland. I had already pinpointed the location where I wanted to install it, but troop movements were so heavy that week throughout the Washington area that we had to wait in Maryland nearly three days for an opportunity to approach the target location.
Civilian vehicular traffic has long been quite encumbered in the Washington area by roadblocks, restricted sections of many roads, inspection points, and so on, but that week it had become almost impossible. On the way back to our printing shop-headquarters, the roads were congested by long streams of civilian vehicles, all going in the opposite direction and piled high with household belongings lashed to doors, hoods, and roofs. Then, about half a mile from the shop, I ran into a new military roadblock, which hadn't been there when I left. Coils of barbed wire were strung across the road, and a tank was parked behind the barbed wire.
I turned around and tried another street; it was blocked also. I shouted across the barrier to a soldier, telling him where I was headed and asking him what unblocked street I could take to get there. "You can't go there at all," he shouted back. "This is a security area. Everyone was evacuated this morning. Any civilian spotted inside the perimeter will be shot on sight."
I was stunned. What had happened to Katherine and the others?
Apparently the military authorities had suddenly extended the radius of the security area around the Pentagon from its former two miles to three miles without warning. Our shop had been a safe halfmile outside the former perimeter, and it had never occurred to us that it would be extended. But it had been, evidently to keep the Organization from planting a nuclear bomb close enough to take out the Pentagon. Actually, I considered the former perimeter adequate protection from our 60-kiloton warheads, since the Pentagon was long ago equipped with blast shutters over all windows and surrounded by reinforced-concrete blast deflectors. I'd been trying without success to figure how to get a bomb inside that perimeter since I arrived back in Washington from California.
I drove to our unit's emergency rendezvous point a few miles south of Alexandria, but there was no one there and no message for me. I had no way to contact Washington Field Command to find out where Katherine, Bill, and Carol were, because all our communications equipment was in the shop. But the fact they weren't at the rendezvous point made me almost certain that they had been arrested.
It was already past midnight, but I immediately headed north again, toward the area where the evacuees I had passed earlier were bound. I thought I might find out from someone who had lived in the vicinity of our shop what had happened to my comrades. It was a foolishly dangerous thought, born of my sense of desperation, and I was probably fortunate that a military truck convoy had the highway so thoroughly blocked that I was finally obliged to pull off the road and sleep until morning.
When I finally did reach the refugee area later that day, I soon realized that the chance of obtaining the information I sought was very slim. A sea of army tents had been erected in a huge, suburban supermarket parking lot and in an adjacent field. Around the edge of the encampment was a jam-packed mass of outdoor chemical toilets, civilian vehicles still piled high with household goods, refugees, and soldiers.
I wandered through the milling throng for nearly three hours and saw no familiar faces. I tried questioning a few people at random, but I got nowhere. People were frightened and gave me only evasive answers or none at all. They were miserable and bewildered, but they wanted no more trouble than they already had, and questions about arrests they might have witnessed spelled trouble to them.
As I passed one tent about twice as large as the others, I heard muffled screams and hysterical sobbing coming from inside, interspersed with loud, coarse, masculine laughter and banter. A dozen Black soldiers were lined up at the entrance.
I stopped to find out what was happening, just as two grinning Black soldiers forced their way through the throng in front of the tent and went inside, dragging a terrified, sobbing White girl about 14 years old between them. The raping queue moved forward another space.
I ran over to a White officer wearing a major's insignia who was standing only about 50 yards away. I began angrily protesting what was happening, but before I had finished my first sentence the officer turned shamefacedly away from me and hurried off in the opposite direction. Two White soldiers nearby cast their eyes downward and disappeared between two tents. No one wanted to be suspected of "racism." I fought down a nearly overpowering impulse to draw my pistol and begin shooting everyone in sight, and then left.
I drove to the one place I was reasonably sure was still manned by Organization personnel: the old gift shop in Georgetown. It was just outside the new Pentagon security perimeter. I arrived there as dusk was falling and pulled the pickup truck around to the rear service entrance.
I had just climbed out of the truck and stepped into the shadows at the rear of the building when the world around me suddenly lit up as bright as noon for a moment. First there was an intensely bright flash of light, then a weaker glow which cast moving shadows and changed from white to yellow to red in the course of a few seconds.
I ran to the alley, so that I could have a more nearly unobstructed view of the sky. What I saw chilled my blood and caused the hairs on the back of my neck to rise. An enormous, bulbous, glowing thing, a splotchy ruby-red in color for the most part but shot through with dark streaks and also dappled with a shifting pattern of brighter orange and yellow areas, was rising into the northern sky and casting its ominous, blood-red light over the land below. It was truly a vision from hell.
As I watched, the gigantic fireball continued to expand and rise, and a dark column, like the stem of an immense toadstool, became visible beneath it. Bright, electric-blue tongues of fire could be seen flickering and dancing over the surface of the column. They were huge lightning bolts, but at their distance no thunder could be heard from them. When the noise finally came, it was a dull, muffled sound, yet still overwhelming: the sort of sound one might expect to hear if an inconceivably powerful earthquake rocked a huge city and caused a thousand 100-story skyscrapers to crumble into ruins simultaneously. g
I realized that I was witnessing the annihilation of the city of Baltimore, 35 miles away, but I could not understand the enormous magnitude of the blast. Could one of our 60-kiloton bombs have done that? It seemed more like what one would expect from a megaton bomb.
The government news reports that night and the next day claimed that the warhead which destroyed Baltimore, killing more than a million people, as well as the blasts which destroyed some two-dozen other major American cities the same day, had been set off by us. They also claimed that the government had counterattacked and destroyed the "nest of racist vipers" in California. As it turned out, both claims were false, but it was two days before I learned the full story of what had actually happened.
Meanwhile, it was with a feeling of deepest despair that I and half-a-dozen others who were gathered around the television set in the darkened basement of the gift shop late that night heard a newscaster gloatingly announce the destruction of our liberated zone in California. He was a Jew, and he really let his emotions carry him away; I have never before heard or seen anything like it.
After a solemn rundown of most of the cities which had been hit that day, with preliminary estimates of the death tolls (sample: "… and in Detroit, which the racist fiends struck with two of their missiles, t
hey murdered over 1.4 million innocent American men, women, and children of all races…"), he came to New York. At that point tears actually appeared in his eyes and his voice broke.
Between sobs he gasped out the news that 18 separate nuclear blasts had leveled Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs and suburbs out to a radius of approximately 20 miles, with an estimated 14 million killed outright and perhaps another five million expected to die of burns or radiation sickness within the next few days. Then he lapsed into Hebrew and began a strange, wailing chant, as tears streamed down his cheeks and his clenched fists pounded his breast.
After a few seconds of this he recovered, and his demeanor changed completely. Anguish was replaced first by a burning hatred for those who had destroyed his beloved, Jewish New York City, then by an expression of grim satisfaction which gradually turned into an exultant gloating: "But we have taken our vengeance against our enemies, and they are no more. Time and again, throughout history, the nations have risen up against us and tried to expel us or kill us, lot we have always triumphed in the end. No one can resist us. All those who have tried-Egypt, Persia, Rome, Spain, Russia, Germany - have themselves been destroyed, and we have always emerged triumphant from the ruins. We have always survived and prospered. And now we have utterly crushed the latest of those who have raised their hands against us. Just as Moshe smote the Egyptian, so have we smitten the Organization."
His tongue flickered wetly over his lips and his dark eyes gleamed balefully as he described the hail of nuclear annihilation which he said had been unleashed on California that very afternoon: "Their precious racial superiority did not help them a bit when we fired hundreds of nuclear missiles into the racist stronghold," the newscaster gloated. "The White vermin died like flies. We can only hope they realized in their last moments that many of the loyal soldiers who pressed the firing buttons for the missiles which killed them were Black or Chicano or Jewish. Yes, the Whites and their criminal racial pride have been wiped out in California, but now we must kill the racists everywhere else, so that racial harmony and brotherhood can be restored to America. We must kill them! Kill them! Kill! Kill!…"
The Turner Diaries: A Novel Page 25