Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  Men were already dying. Below him and to his right across the river, Wingfield could see the still smoldering ruins of the Portland Expo Center and the burning buildings on Hayden Island, which had been destroyed by the Nationalist guns and mortars during the previous night’s barrage. Similar wreckage still burned and cast a pall of smoke into the air from behind him on the Washington side, the work of the American artillery. The Union troops hiding in the abandoned docks and warehouses and along the streets of the little island had all been driven off, the survivors scrambling across to the Oregon shore on motor launches and rubber rafts. Nationalist soldiers were now dug in all along the island shore firing at anything that moved in Oregon. Using his field glasses, through the smoke and the haze Wingfield could see the improvised barricades, sandbagged machine gun nests, and the concrete berms with which the enemy had blocked off the south ends of both twin suspension bridges. He could also see the federals dug in to the southeast, along Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard toward their primary base at Portland International Airport. In the further distance, across North Columbia Boulevard, the city proper began.

  Wingfield was a lean, middle-aged man with a swept-back ducktail haircut who looked like an evil Elvis. Rank hath its privileges; in a newly formed army where most of the soldiers had so far been issued only bits and pieces of uniform items, and where many still wore the civilian clothes in which they had just fought a five-year guerrilla insurrection against the United States, he was dressed in one of the few complete Northwest Defense Force uniforms available so far. It was a fatigue outfit consisting of tiger-striped camouflage and a sharp-billed Alpine cap with brown laced boots. In his kit, Wingfield also had an NDF garrison uniform in dark olive green, with tan trousers, high polished boots, and a billed cap. It looked remarkably like a British officer’s turnout from World War One, the pattern on which it had been based by an aesthetically minded design committee.

  The camos bore a blue, white and green Northwest Tricolor flag patch on the right shoulder. Over the buttoned right shirt pocket and on the headgear was a silver embroidered World War Two Wehrmacht eagle and swastika patch. The NDF’s Special Service élite units had been wearing the eagle on their tunics and old Germanic SS runes on their collar tabs ever since the Party and the NVA had emerged from underground at the time of the ceasefire back in July, before the Longview Conference. Only yesterday, the Christian delegates to the Constitutional Convention now meeting in Olympia had been protesting against the eagle, wanting to substitute some kind of krinkeljammer that would not offend the sensibilities of paleoconservatives in their ranks who yearned for the 1950s. They could not break themselves of the habit of thinking of themselves as Americans, and they still mistakenly equated Hitler and National Socialism with Communism. Since many of the soldiers in the field and the bulk of the pre-Longview NVA veterans were outright National Socialists, or at least had NS tendencies, this was a hard sell.

  Finally, the Convention chairman, General Frank Barrow, newly arrived from the treaty conference at Longview, had worked out a compromise in which the Christians accepted a trade: the military got their eagle and swastika in exchange for adoption of a hymn by Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress, as the national anthem of the new Northwest American Republic. It was the song that had played on the loudspeakers as the first legal Tricolor flag had been raised over Longview ten days before.

  Facing the NDF, and concentrated in the city of Portland itself and around the airport, was a motley crew of Unionists. The core group, Partman’s first line, was the United States Marine Corps Northwest Task Force, consisting of elements mostly from the Third Marine Division out of Camp Pendleton. But it also contained bits and pieces of everybody and everything else that the United States government had been able to scrape up back in January. The task force had first occupied the city after a single night’s running street battle between the NVA, the Portland police, and the Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization had destroyed sections of the city and left over a thousand cops, FBI and other secret police, and officers of the FATPO dead. [See The Brigade by the same author.] Now most of them were refusing to leave, following Partman’s mutinous lead, although there was a steady trickle of deserters slipping over the Columbia as white cops, soldiers and Marines went AWOL to join their racial brothers in the Nationalist army.

  There were approximately 8,000 United States Marines and other active duty U.S. military presently under Partman’s command, from every branch of the service, including a U.S. Army Ranger battalion, part of a Stryker brigade, and several artillery batteries containing at least twenty-odd fieldpieces; NDF intelligence had confirmed 19, but there were almost certainly more deployed inside the city. In addition to the regular military personnel, Partman had under him about 12,000 members of FATPO, well armed and in theory highly trained, although of dubious personal quality and moral fiber, as well as about 4,000 Portland cops, Oregon State Police, and odds and sods of the Oregon National Guard, mostly non-whites of various kinds. Many of the white National Guard officers had deserted or had gone over to the new government.

  Finally, Partman theoretically commanded an unknown number of ragbag, lightly armed and ill-disciplined “local militia” ranging from anti-NVA Christian and Unionist vigilante groups like the Loyal Americans’ League and the Oregon Watchmen, down to armed contingents of the Portland chapters of the Crips, the Bloods, the Salvadorean MS-13, and the Asian Ghost Shadows gang. Plus he had virtually every black, brown, yellow, and sodomitic person remaining in Portland, armed with whatever weapons they could lay hands on.

  On paper at least, the NDF had the enemy outnumbered. Behind Wingfield on the Washington side of the river were 45,000 troops of what was officially designated the First Army, including tanks and artillery that had been captured or voluntarily handed over by defecting United States soldiers from Fort Lewis and other military installations. The Nationalist General Robert Gair had moved on Portland up Interstate 5 from Salem in the south, with 16,000 men of the Second Army, and his forces had pushed into the city as far as Highway 26, thus far meeting with little resistance. Gair’s men were now sheltering along the south side of Powell Boulevard, ready to begin the assault on Wingfield’s orders at 7:30. General Robert DiBella and his Third Army, mostly from Seattle, had crossed the newly repaired Longview Bridge on October 30 with 14,000 NDF, including 2,000 Special Service or SS men, the closest the emerging new Republic had to an élite force. At Clatskanie, Oregon, his force had joined with a smaller corps of 8,000 men under General Zack Hatfield, commander of the famous Wild Bunch guerrilla unit from the NVA days, bringing the Third Army up to around 22,000 troops assaulting Portland down Sunset Highway from the west, their major target being Partman’s headquarters at City Hall on Fifth Avenue in downtown Portland.

  Those 83,000 men were a fair-sized army, but there were more. Inside the city itself, there were the two small but lethal NVA Portland Brigades commanded by Commandants Billy Jackson and Tommy Coyle, the same men who had torn Portland to shreds and sent the Unionists running back to the shelter of their barracks in a panic-stricken rout back in January. Although there were still active NVA crews operating in Canada, the Portland brigades were the only Northwest rebel units inside the Republic that were still officially NVA instead of NDF, due to the underground nature of their operations in a city still heavily occupied by the Union. Nobody knew how they were deployed, including Wingfield, but he was in contact with both NVA brigade commanders and he knew they were ready to move on his signal at 7:30.

  Some of the NDF’s troops were white soldiers who had deserted from the American forces, army and police, and sometimes even from FATPO itself. They were fairly young and fit, and passably trained. However, many more were either middle-aged Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran veterans who, while willing, were out of shape and out of practice, or else they were teenaged kids as young as 16. Some were even younger, having lied about their ages. The officers and some of the SS squads were Northwest Volunteers who had
fought in the guerrilla war, but most of them were summer soldiers, volunteers of both genders who had joined the Northwest independence movement after the ceasefire in July when it emerged from underground and at last they could be located by those who wanted to enlist. Some had received only about, three weeks of very basic training indeed, provided at impromptu camps set up around the Northwest in the weeks and months after the announcement of negotiations and the ceasefire.

  The NDF also included a large and increasing number of foreign volunteers from all over what remained of the Western world, and some of them had military experience, but they were hard to integrate with the North American units due to language and other problems. They were formed into their own companies, battalions, and brigades of the International Division, including the St. George Brigade from England, the German Panzer Grenadiers, the Russian Archangel Michael Brigade, the Italian and Spanish Blue Brigade, the Viking Brigade from Scandinavia, the Scots Guards and the Irish Brigade, and the French and Quebecois Brigade Charlemagne.

  Feeding this number of men was a problem; the NDF had been forced to confiscate stocks of canned goods and other foodstuffs from grocery store chains up and down the coast and from the shops of Koreans and Arabs whose owners had fled. Most Northwestern cities had only a week’s worth of food and other supplies if over-the-road transport and resupply were cut off. With elements of the American government already working to undermine President Clinton and the Treaty and talking sanctions, just feeding the Northwest military was already starting to cause hardship. The implications for the civilian population were even worse; there were reports of runs on grocery stores and food hoarding from all over the new Republic.

  The NDF troops were armed with a miscellany of small arms and other weapons. The bulk of them carried M16 variations, mostly M16A4s captured from enemy armories or else taken off the dead bodies of FATPOs and cops during the guerrilla war, but many also carried Kalashnikovs from large arms shipments sent to the NVA and NDF by certain sympathetic parties in Russia and parts unknown. The Nationalists had an adequate amount of ammunition for the moment, but a pitched battle would gobble it up like popcorn, and their ammo resupply was by no means certain. Artillery shells and rockets were especially limited; the coming day would use up almost all the NDF’s reserves. The retreating American forces were taking all their weapons and supplies with them or else destroying them rather than hand them over to the NDF. One of the reasons the Nationalists needed to capture Portland so badly, aside from political and morale considerations, was to seize the enemy’s arms and supply dumps.

  About 200 yards in front of Wingfield’s position stood the Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia River. The twin I-5 bridge was about two thirds of a mile long, a pair of identical conjoined steel truss bridges, three northbound and three southbound lanes running side by side, that normally carried interstate traffic over the river between Vancouver and Portland. On the Oregon end, the Americans had installed formidable barricades of concrete Bremer walls, behind which were unknown but significant numbers of Marines and U.S. Army Rangers. The Nationalist army had to cross the river on the bridges; there simply wasn’t enough aquatic transport to move all of them across, since the enemy’s artillery and mortars had swept the Washington shore of all boats.

  Besides the I-5, there were other bridges across the Columbia River into Portland. There was the long and winding concrete I-205 bridge just upriver to the east, as well as a trestle railway bridge just downriver to the west. These were now the only way across for many miles; somehow, Wingfield had to get a whole army over them and into the Union-occupied city, under fire, without them being massacred and without the bridges being blown out from under them. He counted on the simultaneous assault of the Second and Third Armies and the NVA forces within the city to keep the bulk of Partman’s forces busy and tied down in place, but forcing these narrow bridges in the face of entrenched opposition could only be bloody.

  Some days before, when it became obvious how the coming battle would shape up and what role the bridges would play, a special NVA commando team from within the city had captured and destroyed the diesel generator in the control house on the center of the I-5 bridge, in order to stop Partman from raising the midsection. The previous night, squads of NDF had occupied most of it almost to the very end on the Portland side, where they now crouched behind the steel stanchions, sandbagged emplacements, and anything concrete that could offer cover, exchanging desultory fire with the Americans behind their own sandbags and concrete Bremer walls. During the night, teams of NDF had conducted an extended examination by flashlight, some of them swinging below the bridges on rappelling lines, and they had confirmed that the Union forces had wired the central load-bearing columns of all three bridges with heavy charges of explosives, set to blow with radio-controlled detonators. The entire night had been spent in locating the charges, disarming and removing them, rappelling men down under the columns to remove them where necessary, sometimes under fire. Why the supposedly experienced veteran commander General Partman had not given the order to detonate the explosives once he realized they had been discovered remained a mystery.

  On the ground at Wingfield’s side stood a young man wearing an NDF captain’s uniform, his adjutant and former son-in-law, Shane Ryan. “I guess now we know why Partman didn’t blow the bridges before,” he said. “He wanted to catch us coming across and blow all our asses into the river.”

  “Yeah. He was being too damned clever for his own good,” drawled Wingfield, sweeping the enemy shore with his field glasses. The South Carolina Low Country where Wingfield had been born was still embedded in his speech despite all the years he had now spent in Washington State.

  “Didn’t he think we’d be smart enough to check the bridges out for booby traps before we moved out?” wondered Ryan aloud.

  Wingfield barked out a snarling and contemptuous laugh. “You heard him on TV, Shane. He thinks we’re just a bunch of dumb-ass rednecks. Even after the past five years, while we whipped everything the Americans could throw at us down into jelly, he still holds us in contempt. These assholes still can’t believe they’ve been beaten by ordinary working white folks who finally had enough of their bullshit.”

  “But why the hell didn’t Partman order the bridges blown once he realized that we had found his explosives?” the young officer wondered. “What the hell is he up to?”

  “He wants us to attack across the bridges,” replied Wingfield. “He’s daring us to do it. He’s got a strong defensive position and he thinks we can’t force it. Even if we do get all the charges, he thinks he can still just shoot us down like fish in a barrel when we try. It’s the same kind of hubris we’ve seen ever since this started. That ridge-running bush ape just can’t believe we have the guts to go up against him and his gyrenes head-on.”

  “Is he right?” asked Shane. “I mean, can he hold us off? This looks like a death trap to me.”

  “Maybe. Fact is we’ve got no choice. It’s our land now, and he’s on it. We gotta show him the door, and do it in front of the whole world. We have to prove we ain’t just a bunch of back-shooting peckerwood thugs like he called us, that the Northwest Republic is now a sovereign state, and we brook no insult or trespass from buzz-cut red-white-and-blue dummocks. We always knew that one day it would come to this. No more shoot-and-scoot. This time we throw down head on, face to face.”

  “It would be a real bonus if we can take the airport intact,” said Ryan. “No holes in the tarmac.”

  “Not sure how many people will be flying in and out, though, if those snakes in Congress renege on the Treaty and impose sanctions,” replied the older man.

  “Do we have any word on whether or not the enemy satellite surveillance is active?” Ryan asked. “I really don’t like the idea of them being able to watch every move we make over here. Wish to hell we could find some way to take those goddamned spy satellites out.”

  “I think after last night’s festivities, Partman definitely kno
ws we’re here,” replied Wingfield. “He don’t need no Eye In The Sky to tell him that. And yes, they may be watching us now on laptops with satellite uplinks. If that’s the case then there’s not much we can do about it. Nor for that matter can Partman. He’s made a politically bad move here. For all his posturing on CNN and Fox News and all his cheering section in Congress, he can’t expect any backup from his former masters in Washington, D.C. They did everything they could to stall us and divert us at Longview, but they wouldn’t have buckled and signed the Treaty in the end if they didn’t understand that their whole ball of wax is about to go down, including their precious goddamned Israel, and they have to let us go if they want to survive with any of their power and privilege intact. The decision’s been made in the back rooms of power, whether Partman accepts it or not. The United States can’t afford the Northwest any more, and so they’re cutting us loose. Besides, all the intelligence in the world doesn’t do you any good if your soldiers are crap. You can’t drive a nail with a marshmallow. The human spirit is greater than any machine, Shane. We’ve already beaten these bastards just by being here, it’s just that buzz-cut jarhead over there is too stupid to get it.”

  “Or he just wants to be president, and he doesn’t care how many more people have to die so he can look good in the primaries,” said the young officer bitterly.

  “Well, let’s just make sure he doesn’t make it to the primaries,” replied Wingfield with a scowl. The wireless phone set in his ear buzzed.

  “The last disposal team is coming in off the 205, sir,” said a voice from the phone in Wingfield’s ear. “Looks like one of our guys was hit. They’re heading your way to get to the MASH.”

  “Did they get all the charges?” asked Wingfield. “Never mind, I’m coming down.” He jumped down and got into the Humvee, and the adjutant started the vehicle and headed for the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital that had been established in an abandoned aircraft hangar at Pearson Field on the Vancouver side, as close to the I-5 bridge as they dared, in anticipation of the stream of casualties that would be coming from across the bridge later in the day.