Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “Not too many,” replied James McCann. “They blew the bridge right when we started to move forward, and that shield car took a lot of the blast. Most of the men got off okay. Some damned fool over there across the way was too impatient, I guess, or maybe he thought the shield vehicle was full of explosives and we were trying to ram ’em. Couldn’t wait for us to get out onto the middle, when they would have killed a lot more of us. We were lucky. Over.”

  “Either that or our artillery freaked him out.” Wingfield responded. “Peckerwood white trash criminals ain’t supposed to pack fieldpieces. No getting across that way at all now? Over.”

  “No, sir, it’s gone. A good forty feet in the middle is just splinters and stumps now. Over.”

  “Right, listen up. Here’s what we gone do. Get your guys on the move and bring your whole division eastward. Follow the railroad tracks and try to stay under cover and out of sight from the Oregon side as best you can, and then cut over on Sixth Street. The reports I’m getting indicate that the shellfire isn’t too bad. It looks like they’re overshooting like hell, plus if they have any rockets they’re not cutting loose with them so far. Send your first brigade across the I-5 after my guys are all on the bridge, and send your second down to the 205 and have them follow Corby Morgan’s people across over there. Those bridges are still up and we’ve cleaned all the enemy demolition ordnance off them.” (“I hope,” Wingfield muttered under his breath.) “You copy all that? Over.”

  “Copy that, Sunray. Wilco. Badbreaker out.”

  “Okay, comrades, we’re going to have a major troop movement of about four thousand men crossing the enemy’s front, and we need to make sure they don’t get hammered by the heavy stuff,” called out Wingfield. “Who’s hooked up with artillery fire control?”

  A woman soldier raised her hand. “I am, sir.”

  “Tell our spotters keep an eagle eye on what’s left of the Expo Center and all those shelled-out buildings from last night along Marine and Swift. The Americans can still set up mortars in the rubble where they’ve got cover. At the first sign of any hostile activity or anything directed at McCann’s division or the I-5 bridge, tell the batteries to redirect and pound the hell out of it. We’ll give ’em the Katyushas early if we have to.” An American shell crashed into one of the other houses on officer’s row, shaking the Marshall House and causing Wingfield to stagger a bit, and then a second shell hit even closer, the shrapnel breaking some of the windows. “Hellfire! Well, better they’re shelling us than our men on the bridges, damned fools! That reminds me, though, how are we doing on taking out those Union guns in the park and on the golf course?”

  “Two of ’em at least are gone, sir,” Lieutenant Campbell said. “We have a Threesec spotter doing a Tarzan act up on top of the I-5. She climbed up there onto a beam or something pretty high up, where she can see over what’s left of the buildings along the river. She’s got a set of field glasses, one of our radios she got from somewhere, and a wireless laptop. What she can’t see, she can get off Google and CNN. She has a bird’s eye view of Edgewater golf course, the Arboretum and Delta Park East. She’s calling in to C Battery, that’s the 155s on the corner of Maritime and Columbia, and also to the Sector Two mortar crews’ fire control officer. That’s about twenty-five pieces, eighty-one mils mostly. She’s dropping some heavy shit on those niggers along MLK and all the way down to Bridgeton.”

  “She?” shouted Wingfield in exasperation. “Judas priest, did none of you ladies understand my order to stay out of direct contact with the enemy? I thought I was supposed to be a general or something? Army Council says so, anyway. Didn’t any of these mutinous gals get the memo?”

  “This girl says she’s Third Section and she knows you, sir,” replied Campbell. “Anyway, she didn’t ask me or anybody else here. She just went out there on her own. First we heard of it was when she started calling in to C Battery a few minutes ago.”

  “Pipe it up so I can hear whatever the hell she’s doing,” ordered Wingfield. Campbell turned a dial on a field radio set. Now he could hear the crackling voices on the air.

  “Nightshade, this is Barnacle Bill,” came a male voice. “How were those last three on that one-ten on the golf course? Over.”

  “Barnacle Bill is C Battery commander,” explained Lieutenant Campbell. “He’s a former Navy guy.”

  “I never would have guessed,” muttered Wingfield.

  “Barnacle Bill, this is Nightshade,” came the voice of a girl who sounded like she was about thirteen years old. Lieutenant Emily Pastras Brock was perched on a girder on the center span of the I-5 bridge, about 300 feet over the highway, leaning on a suspension cable so she didn’t fall while she used her binoculars. A thin girl who still sported teenaged acne, she was wearing a warm shepherd’s coat over her camos and a wool pea cap on her head. Her long brown hair hung stringily from beneath the pea cap in the standard braid NVA women had learned was best for action. Her hands were bare and freezing cold, since gloved fingers couldn’t work the laptop or the radio adequately. “All three of your shells boxed him, but you were all short or wide. Over.”

  “How many clicks, Nightshade? Over.”

  “Sorry, Bill, I don’t know what a click is. You were all about fifty yards short, one way or the other. Tighten the whole group up inward by that much and you’ll light him up, is all I can say. Does that make any sense?”

  “Yeah, we’ll tweak it. Incoming in one minute. Don’t worry, Nightshade, you’re doing fine. Over.”

  “Nightshade?” muttered Wingfield. “Wait a minute, I remember now. Yeah, I do know that girl. I think she’s about seventeen. Oh, this is beautiful.” He picked up the mic. “Nightshade, this is Sunray. Refresh my memory. You’re that skinny teenybopper from Threesec we pulled out of a mess in that Holy Roller church up in Seattle back in July before the conference, right? Over.”

  “Affirmative, sir,” came Nightshade’s voice. “I remember you. You’re the SS guy who looks like Elvis. Over.”

  “That’s General Elvis, and thank yuh very much. It was you and your boyfriend, as I recall. Over.”

  “Lieutenant Brock, yes, sir. Over.”

  “Yeah, you guys were up at the conference in Longview. I know because I saw you two on the front page of USA Today, having a slurp session out by the candy machine at that hotel. Over,” recalled Wingfield.

  “That was in the line of duty, sir. Over,” came the girl’s prim response.

  “Yeah, I bet it was. What happened to him? Over,” asked Wingfield.

  “I decided I had to make an honest man of him, so we got married, sir. Over,” she replied.

  “Is he out there with you? Over,” asked Wingfield.

  “No, sir, he’s down below me somewhere. He’s with his company on the I-Five. Over.”

  “Well, you know you’re disobeying orders and you’re not supposed to be swinging from the cables like a monkey or however you got up there, but now that you’re there you can make yourself useful. How’s it look from where you sit? Over.”

  “I can see two self-propelled 203s and two 155s on the golf course that are still firing, plus two more one-fifty-fives that took hits. They’re smashed to shit,” the girl told him. “There’s two more two-oh-threes in Delta Park and there’s another two guns in the Arboretum. Can’t tell what they are. They’re all dug into bunkers with sandbags and Bremer walls all around them. The only way to take them out is if our guys can drop a shell right on top of their heads. Over.”

  “They’re still not firing on the bridge? Over,” asked Wingfield incredulously.

  “No, sir. Not yet. They’re gunning for you guys over the river, looks like. Over.”

  “Partman must have more charges planted on the I-Five we didn’t find,” murmured Jenny Campbell grimly. Wingfield glanced down and saw her clenching her fists until the knuckles were white. Her man’s probably on the bridge too, he thought grimly.

  “If they’re gunning for us, they’re not doing very well,” Wingfi
eld told her. “They’re shelling Vancouver, either because they’re lousy shots or because they’re just incompetent. Any sign of anti-aircraft ordnance near those guns? Over.”

  “Affirmative, sir, Some Humvees with mounted twin fifties and a couple more with some kind of missile launcher. Over.”

  “Okay, Nightshade, keep on doing what you’re doing. In a minute or so I’m going to have Lieutenant Campbell here patch you into Luftwaffe Twelve as he and his boys come in and join the show, and I want you to see if you can give him a running commentary on what you see. You especially need to keep track of those anti-aircraft vehicles. Over.”

  “Roger, sir. Nightshade out.”

  “Sunray out.”

  * * *

  At that moment Nightshade’s husband Lieutenant Cody Brock, aged 18, was marching at the head of his men across the southbound span of the twin I-5 bridge. He was now in command of Company F, First Battalion, Fourth NDF Infantry Brigade, which consisted of about 80 men, or to be more precise, about 30 men and 50 or so boys Cody’s age or younger. His unit was one of the outfits that had been issued with AK-74s. In addition to his weapon he carried a pack and a field radio. One of the other officers, an Iraq veteran, had advised him to do so. “Always carry your own radio. In case things get hot, you don’t want yourself going one way and your communications another.”

  The first outfit in the marching column in the southbound lanes, right behind the front-end loader, were the 400-odd Germans of the Panzer Grenadier Brigade, although their armor at the moment consisted purely of the Caterpillar that led the way. Their three tanks and several Strykers would follow them across the bridge later, once the obstacles were cleared away. The PGs were commanded by former Bundeswehr officer Conrad Baumgarten, one of the first Germans to find his way to the Northwest. For most of the guerrilla war he had been one of the NVA’s top snipers, with a kill score second only to that of the legendary Cat-Eyes Lockhart himself. He had specialized in Jewish targets; being deployed in New York City on the NVA’s Operation Applesmash had been Baumgarten’s slice of pure heaven. Once, on learning that a certain wealthy banker and financier of the Mosaic persuasion was to show up for a cocktail party in a luxury hotel, Baumgarten snuck in early to avoid the security sweeps before the affair, and then lay prone and concealed in a heating duct for two days waiting for the moment to take his shot.

  Almost every man in the unit had done prison time in Germany, sometimes years of it, mostly for crimes of the mind: Holocaust denial, singing a forbidden song from the old days, peacefully protesting against the transformation of Germany into a province of Kurdistan, or simply for the crime of raising their outstretched palm higher than their shoulder in public. They had all found their way by hook or crook to the Northwest, seeking out a new Fatherland where they could be Germans once again. “Mein boys vant to be first over ze river,” Baumgarten had told Wingfield. “Ve owe zese American bastards a debt from nineteen forty-five.” From somewhere or other (rumor had it stolen from the prop stores of a major Hollywood movie studio) the NDF’s Quartermaster Corps had somehow obtained a sufficient number of World War Two style coal-scuttle helmets for the unit, only instead of black and white and red shield insignia on the left side of the helmets the shield was in blue, white, and green. The PGs’ assigned tanks and Strykers bore the old Third Reich Iron Cross symbol, but in green outlined in blue trim.

  To the left, the Fourth Infantry men could just crane their necks and see the tops of the heads of a similar force to theirs, marching in the same direction although in the normally northbound lanes and led by a similar armored bulldozer. This was Colonel Mike Davis’s corps, attacking parallel with them on the other bridge. They faced the same kind of entrenched enemy barricades they would have to break through on the Oregon side.

  Cody Brock’s company sergeant major was a summer soldier, another Iraq and Iran veteran. He was a chunky, bearded, middle-aged construction worker with a red boozer’s nose from Kelso, Washington, named Bernard Snow. Sergeant Snow maintained the old military tradition wherein Top actually ran the outfit for some kid officer, and so long as the kid didn’t meddle, Snowy graciously pretended that he was actually in charge. It helped that Cody had been a Northwest Volunteer and proven his mettle many times over during the guerrilla war, which the older man knew and respected. Today Foxtrot and Golf companies were mingled together in the column; Cody and the G Company commander marched at the head of the line while the two respective CSMs herded up the rear watching for stragglers and wounded.

  Cody found himself walking beside the CO of G Company, a tall and muscular young man in his twenties, with longish auburn hair and a light thin moustache, packing an M16 slung over one shoulder. “I saw you at the briefing. I’m Cody Brock.”

  “Jason Stockdale,” came the reply.

  “You NVA?” asked Brock.

  “Oh, yeah. Montana. Missoula Brigade. Before that I did a year with the Regulators, until that cock-up in Helena.”

  “You knew Jack Smith?”

  “I did. Good man. I was with the column that went into Helena that night. I made it back. A lot didn’t.” While they spoke bullets from the Oregon shore were whining overhead and ricocheting off the steel columns over their heads with a clang.

  “How green are your guys?” asked Cody.

  “All my NCOs are Volunteers, but most of my company is just out of the depot at Centralia,” replied Stockdale. “Got here two days ago. Got a few Middle East vets, but some of them aren’t even old enough to drive.” The bullets from the Oregon shore whipping and zinging over their heads began to increase in number, and more bullets could be heard slapping into the sides of the mantlets carried by the men along the right file of the column. Instinctively all the NDF men hunched down and leaned forward, as if they were walking into a driving rainstorm.

  Stockdale turned back and yelled at his men, “Keep walking and pay no mind, boys! We’re just out for a stroll! Anybody gets hit, if they’re alive call for medevac, if they’re dead take their ammo and rations and leave them by the side of the bridge! Don’t worry, it will be our turn in a few minutes!” Somewhere ahead there was an explosion, shouting and screams; some kind of grenade had been lobbed or fired into the marching men. Yet the column moved forward. The NDF had been frankly worried that untried men and teenaged boys with three weeks of training, however strong in spirit, would break and run under fire. It wasn’t happening.

  “You married?” asked Cody, desperately trying to sound casual and pass the time as if they weren’t being fired on. He looked down just in time to step over the dead bloody body of a young German who lay face down on the asphalt. To his left medevac trucks and SUVs scooted up and down the bridge, taking bullets, picking up wounded men and running them back to the medical units in the rear. Hitting and running during the guerrilla war had been one thing; marching headlong into the enemy guns was turning out to be another.

  “Gonna be married, if we both make it through,” said Stockdale. “Jenny and I decided if one of us doesn’t, then the other one deserves a clean fresh start with no baggage. She’s back there in the ops center working a laptop or something. Soon as this bridge is safe and we’ve taken out the trash and moved those damned Bremer walls down there out of the way, she’ll be driving a truck across. You?”

  “Yeah, my lady and I had an NVA military wedding on the night of the twenty-second up at Longview. We were in the delegation to the Treaty talks. Seemed like a good way to round off a great day. Emily’s supposed to be back at HQ now doing something on a computer as well, but if I know her she’s found some way to get across the river ahead of us.”

  “I agree with Wingfield’s call on that,” said Stockdale. “Using women as guerrilla fighters during the revolt was a necessary evil. Sending them marching headlong into the enemy guns to be slaughtered like this was goddamned Verdun is something else. We have to start proving the Republic has better standards of moral decency than we’ve been living with for the past century. Jenny w
asn’t happy about it, but she understands. She’s a soldier and she obeys orders.”

  “You meet her in the Volunteers?” asked Brock.

  “Oh, we knew each other from the sandbox back in Missoula. Well, she was in the sandbox anyway, when I first saw her. I’m seven years older.”

  “Mine was a Third Section spook at age sixteen,” said Cody.

  “How the hell did you hook up with some Threesec Mata Hari?” asked Stockdale.

  “Out on a tickle with Bobby Bells’ crew up in Seattle,” explained Cody. “I pistol-whipped her and she tried to stick a switch-blade in my eye. That was our first date. Long story.” [See A Mighty Fortress.] Something snapped overhead and exploded with a flash, the concussion making them stagger. “What the fuck was that?”

  “Forty-mil grenade, I imagine,” said Stockdale, shaking his head. “High. They’ll get the range better as we get closer. Well, at least we haven’t had the bridge blown out from under us yet.”

  In the NDF command post in Marshall House, Wingfield heard the radio chatter of the incoming aircraft. “Sunray, this is Luftwaffe Twelve. We’re over Scappoose now, ETA three minutes, come back.” His voice was distinctly South in the mouth.

  “CB lingo. Must be a trucker as well as a pilot,” said Wingfield. “Luftwaffe One-Two, this is Sunray. Our men are about halfway across the I-5. Luftwaffe Niner, where you at? Over.”

  “Sunray, this is Lufwaffe Nine. We’re over Troutdale, incoming from the east, ETA also three minutes. Over.”

  “Luftwaffe Niner, you take the 205. You know what to do. Over.”

  “Roger, Sunray. Luftwaffe Nine out.”

  “Luftwaffe One-Two, I’m going to patch you in to a young lady named Nightshade who’s doing a human fly act on the top span of the I-Five. She’s spotting for the boom-boom boys and she has her eye on some double-A waiting for you guys. Meet her on Channel Six. Over.”

  “Roger, Sunray. Switching to Six.” The pilot did so. “This is Luftwaffe Twelve. Boss man tells me I’m supposed to hook up with a chick called Nightshade on this channel, come back.”