Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  They were overheard by Doctor Linda Barnard from the School of Media and Journalism. She was a small, forty-something woman with mousy hair, whose freckles gave her an incongruous appearance of youth. They now stood out like ink spots on her ashen face, and the drink in her hand was shaking with fear. “How can you be so blasé, Charles?” she whispered vehemently. “It’s already started! Lou Coppetta is missing! I went over to his house this morning and I found the door smashed in, and no sign of Lou or Sherry!”

  “Probably that Force 101 thing,” said Myers glumly. “What the hell did he stay for? His doctoral thesis was on the legal validity of Native American land claims to most of the state, he was the University chair for the Montana Human Rights Commission, he helped draft Montana’s hatecrime law, and he was a lawyer, for God’s sake! Did he think he wasn’t on somebody’s list? You know, I think this whole thing happened because we simply never could bring ourselves to accept that these are not stupid, ignorant rednecks bashing minorities, and that from the very beginning we were facing a serious and politically focused armed insurrection against the United States.”

  “Stupid, ignorant rednecks are supposed to be incapable of serious political thought,” Luger reminded them. “That was always the Party line, remember? No pun intended. And what about you, Linda? Given your predilection for sleeping with your female undergraduates in return for good grades and job recommendations, I must confess that I’m rather surprised to see you here.”

  “My mother is in the nursing home,” said Linda miserably. “I can’t leave her, and I couldn’t take her with me. She doesn’t know what’s been going on. She barely even knows who I am any more, and she’d be terrified if I tried to drive her across country into unfamiliar surroundings. All I can do is hang on here, keep my head down, and hope that somehow I can slip through the cracks.”

  “Let’s hope nobody on campus dislikes you enough to rat you out as a lesbian,” said Myers sympathetically. “The University and the FBI aren’t the only ones who know how to recruit a network of informers.” Linda trembled from head to toe and knocked back her drink, which Clancy observed consisted of vodka, neat.

  The door opened and a tall, handsome NDF officer walked in, wearing his Class A uniform, complete with Sam Browne belt and high boots. He was alone, which surprised the assembled academics who had expected a squad of goons in camouflage with machine guns. “Morning, everybody!” he called out cheerfully. “Hey, Doctor Myers, Doctor Luger, remember me?”

  “Young Stockdale, isn’t it?” asked Luger, raising his specs to peer through them. “You look like someone who should be behind a glass frame from a hundred years ago, on some octogenarian lady’s mantelpiece in England, in a house full of cats. Yes, I remember you from several of my classes. You were rather outspoken. I was supposed to report the kind of thing you were saying in class to Homeland Security, but being one of those old fossils with ideas about freedom of speech, I never had the heart to do so. It would seem that I should have.”

  “Yes, sir, I remember,” said Jason, walking up to them at the sidebar. Linda Barnard backed away and tried to fade into the wallpaper. “I always appreciated the fact that you didn’t.” He held out his hand and shook with Luger, then with a bemused Myers. “I had several classes with you as well, Dr. Myers. And I remember that you and your family were friends with Jenny Campbell.”

  “Actually, I gather from the news broadcasts that she’s Jenny Stockdale now,” said Myers. “I suppose congratulations are in order. Church wedding with all the trimmings, was it?” The whole thing was surreal to him, like some Mad Hatter’s tea party.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Stockdale. “We were married a few weeks ago, after we finished up in Portland, and no, it was pretty informal.”

  “Well, hail, the conquering hero comes,” remarked Luger. “You’ve even got proper jackboots now.”

  “Why not?” asked Jason, lifting one leg to show them off. “They’re practical, comfortable, and elegant footwear, good for walking around in the snow as well as for stomping Jews with.”

  Luger sighed, and said “And to think, young man, if you had walked into this room a year ago, I could have tripled my retirement fund with one phone call.”

  Jason smiled at them sunnily. “If I had walked into this room a year ago, Doctor Luger, when I walked out again, you wouldn’t have been making any calls.”

  “God, I suppose that’s true, isn’t it?” sighed Luger, with a rueful smile. “My, my, the turn-ups one has out here in the real world. Probably one of the reasons I’ve always chosen to hide behind the ivy-covered walls all my life. The real world can be so unsettling. In any case, what now? Are you here to arrest us and ship us all off to a concentration camp?”

  “I’m here to introduce the next Chancellor of the University of Montana,” Stockdale told them.

  “And who might that be?” asked Clancy Myers curiously.

  “Yes, do tell,” asked Luger with a gleam in his eye. “I’ve often wondered if any of our colleagues here has been secretly polishing the apple with Jerry Reb behind our backs, by way of an insurance policy. Giving you gentry information on the campus and faculty behind our backs, that kind of thing? Like where Ben Levy parked his car?”

  “Actually, yes, the NVA had several Third Section ops on campus almost since the beginning,” Stockdale told them. “I was one myself for a while back in the first days of the revolt, and later on so was Jenny, so we both have fond memories of our college days. But no faculty.”

  “So which one of our esteemed colleagues gets the brass ring?” asked Luger, gesturing with his drink out into the room where everyone else was staring at them and their conversation was perfectly audible. “Who will be our new Chancellor?”

  “I will,” said Jason. “One of the advantages of being part of a victorious revolution is that once the dust settles, you pretty much have your pick of any job you want. I asked for this one, and in view of my services rendered, I got it.”

  “And what job does Jenny want? Governor?” asked Clancy Myers.

  “No, there won’t be any more governors,” Jason told them. “Jenny has made a choice that Amurrica denied to her and to all young white women for two generations, a choice that had she had been allowed to make under Zionist rule, might have kept her out of the NVA.”

  “And what is this forbidden career path?” asked Luger.

  “She is going to live in a home that I provide for her, and she is going to be a mother to a new generation of white children,” said Stockdale. “The Jews literally stole the babies from our people’s cradles, through abortion and feminism and a capitalist economy that forced women to work all their lives just to survive alongside men. We are going to fill those cradles up again. Now, I suppose I need to get the meeting going officially.”

  “One more question, Jason, a rather urgent one,” said Myers. “One of our colleagues is missing. Do you know anything about the whereabouts of Doctor Louis Coppetta and his wife?”

  “Doctor Coppetta is no longer on the university faculty. I think you know why as well as I do. That’s all I can tell you,” Jason told them, with a little smile that froze both men’s blood and suddenly brought home to them exactly what was happening in the real world Dr. Luger had always striven to avoid. They suddenly understood that their former student, whom both men had genuinely liked and respected, now had the power to decide if they lived or died.

  “Can we see him or his wife, and speak to them?” asked Clancy Myers daringly.

  “They’re both unavailable,” replied Jason, his smile unchanged.

  Charles Luger spoke. “I see. Jason, do you remember enough of my course to recall the section on the ancient Roman constitution? How in eighty-one B.C. the Senate formally requested of the dictator Sulla that if he was going to proscribe Roman citizens, could he at least have the courtesy to post a list in the Forum of the men who were to be hunted down and killed? May I ask if such a list exists in our case, and if so, where it can be found?
Somewhere on the internet, no doubt?”

  “Don’t worry, Doctor Luger, you’re not on it.” Jason assured him genially. “If you were, you wouldn’t be here. Besides, you’re one of us.”

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Luger, flummoxed. “How on earth do you make that out, young man?”

  “You just said that Sulla began his dictatorship in eighty-one B.C. You see, I do remember your course. I remember that then you used the politically correct eighty-one B.C.E., Before Common Era, as you were required to by the curriculum and which you would have been disciplined for by the Board of Regents if you hadn’t. Just now, absent the threat of being ratted out and hauled in front of a lefty-lib kangaroo court that could ruin your career, you said B.C.—Before Christ. Your mind never was fully under control, was it, Doctor Luger?”

  “No,” admitted Luger. “No, it wasn’t, and you’re right. A year ago, I would never have made a slip like that. It could have lost me everything.”

  “And you don’t have anything to worry about either, Doctor Myers,” said Jason, turning to Clancy and shaking his hand again. “I never got a chance to thank you for what you did for Jenny after that disaster up in Helena, but you can be sure that neither she nor I have forgotten it. The NVA pays its debts. Now, if you’ll take a seat, we can get started.”

  Later that night at the dinner table, the renewed presence of 14-year-old Bobby Campbell reminded Clancy of Jason Stockdale’s odd remark. Kevin had invited Bobby over, “now that everything’s okay” as he put it, and Amber had been sensible enough not to antagonize the new régime by banning the brother of Montana’s most photogenic new newscaster from her home. Clancy Myers mentioned what had happened just before the official meeting had begun. “I have no idea on earth what the man is talking about!” he complained. Then he noticed Georgia giggling and the two older boys smirking at him. “Wait a minute, do you kids know something about this?”

  “Kind of,” admitted Kevin.

  “Jenny was in the garage!” chirped Georgia with a giant grin, finally able to tell the Great Secret.

  “What?” said Amber, nonplussed.

  “Remember that day those FBI guys came here talking all the crap about Jenny and showing you pictures of her boyfriend Jason?” asked Kevin. “She was in the garage the whole time. With a gun.”

  “Two guns! An Uzi and a nine-millimeter Glock!” said Bobby.

  “I hid her!” announced Georgia, beaming. “It was a secret!”

  “Yeah, Peanut, you hid her all right, but me and Kevin brought her here,” said Bobby.

  “I hate to admit it, honey, but our kids may have saved our lives,” Clancy said to his wife. Amber Myers screamed out loud and fled from the table.

  III

  DON’T TREAD ON ME

  (Four months after Longview)

  “Let them fear, so long as they obey.”

  —Tiberius, Roman emperor

  The NAR’s Council of Ministers, which was now the formal name of the cabinet, convened in the old governor’s conference room in Olympia with the plush red leather chairs on a cold day in late February. There had already been some re-shuffling since the creation of the body back in November. Henry “Red” Morehouse had taken over as permanent Speaker of the Constitutional Convention, whose deliberations were projected to last well into the summer, thus leaving Frank Barrow to deal exclusively with security issues. Dr. Paul Hassling, a physicist with a degree from M.I.T. and a former NVA bombmaker, had joined the cabinet as Energy Minister after it had become apparent that energy was a separate problem of some magnitude, and that Commerce and Industry was too stretched already to cover it.

  Since the arrival of the interim State President from his wartime internment, the office of Chairman of the Council of State had been abolished, and Morehouse had been sworn in as interim Vice President of the Republic. Being a former schoolteacher, he had also taken on the Education portfolio from General Dan Macready, who was still in Missoula as NDF commander for the eastern border, and who had evinced no interest at all in the post to begin with. “How did my name ever get put into that particular hat anyway, Red?” he had asked Morehouse on the phone.

  “Somebody thought we had too many coasties in the Council, and figured we needed somebody in a cowboy hat,” Morehouse responded.

  “Beautiful!” said Macready in disgust. “We win our freedom, and the first thing we do is set up affirmative action quotas!”

  By common consent, Morehouse continued to act as the chair for Council meetings. Today there was a full quorum, including Andrei Stavrovitch Stepanov, who had become Minister for Culture by virtue of his being a classical music aficionado, and Donald “Farmer” Brown, the Minister of Food and Agriculture, who had once been an actual farmer. The American news media and liberal cable TV pundits sneered at the Northwest ministers for their lack of apparent qualifications, to which Red Morehouse had replied in an interview with the BBC, “Yes, I admit, it’s an unusual concept. We believe that the people responsible for government policy and implementation in a given area need to have some actual experience in that field. Liberal democracy’s long-standing practice of appointing cabinet ministers on the basis of gender, skin color, and campaign contributions is obviously much superior.”

  Now Morehouse spoke up. “Right, comrades, our special teleconference call that I memoed all of you about is scheduled for an hour from now. We need to get through as much as we can before then. To begin with, we need to hear situation reports since Friday. First things first. John, how are we militarily?”

  “The Northwest Defense Force now numbers approximately four hundred thousand people in all branches,” said Morgan, consulting some papers he had brought in a file folder. “A far cry from as recently as two years ago, when the NVA consisted of about eight thousand Volunteers. Almost all of the four hundred thousand are army, of course. The Luftwaffe now has around thirteen thousand personnel and over a thousand aircraft we’ve commandeered, almost all civilian prop jobs, but we’ve also got a few private jets and airliners we’re converting into fighter-bombers or transports, as well as over a hundred helicopters. We haven’t even test-flown half of our aircraft yet. I’m hoping to have the whole Luftwaffe in full and correct uniform by the first week in March. Performance-wise, as you know, they did a slap-up job during the battle of Portland and also during the Consolidation, flying intelligence and observation runs, and some bombing missions against loyalist paramilitaries and general Amurrican knuckleheads within the Republic.”

  “Point of order. Is that what we’re calling our current period of time now?” asked Bart DeMarco from the Transport Ministry. “I thought this was the Cleanup?”

  “That term is unofficial,” said Morehouse primly. “Consolidation sounds more dignified. But yes, I’m sure it will be remembered by the people of this country as the Cleanup. Please continue, General Morgan.”

  “Getting back to the Luftwaffe, their morale is high and they’re doing wonders with what we’ve been able to get for them to work with so far, but I don’t have to tell you that any serious opposition to an American air strike is out of the question, and will be for some time. You can’t bring down B-52s, Stealth bombers, Cruise missiles and F-35s with Cessnas, crop dusters, and weather channel copters. One of our top defense priorities has to be establishing some kind of air cover for our country.”

  “There is no way we can win an arms race with the Americans financially, in the air or in space,” warned Ray Ridgeway. “We simply don’t have the money. We will never be able to throw money away on bottomless defense contracting like the Americans do, spending millions and millions of credits to develop some fighter-bomber or missile system that will be obsolete in two years at best. We’re going to have to rely on technological innovation, and not just in the military, but throughout every aspect of life and the economy in the Republic. Quality, not quantity. Brain, not brawn.”

  “Fortunately Aryan man has always been long on brains,” Morehouse replied. “The Kriegsmarine
?”

  “About eight thousand hands so far,” Morgan told them. “We have even less for them to sail than we have planes for the flyboys to fly. I had a long meeting with Admiral Hacker this morning, and he has developed a short-term plan for slapping together a navy for us. Sort of a navy, anyway. Again, all our craft are commandeered from abandoned enemy property, Jews’ yachts and drug dealers’ speedboats and such, or other vessels that were simply abandoned when their owners fled the country. Hacker is concentrating on light stuff, anything we can convert into torpedo patrol boats, missile assault vessels and gunboats. These will at least get our naval ensign out on the ocean where it can be seen from the shore, although once again, resisting any full-scale naval attack from the Americans isn’t in the cards right now.”