Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  Admiral Hector Brava, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a lean and sour-faced Annapolis graduate with a salt and pepper moustache. A white man with a Hispanic name, he had traded on it to get into Annapolis and to some degree in order to gain promotion during his early years. It bothered and shamed him that he had done so, because unlike many people at the top of the American shitheap, Brava was actually half-way competent, both as a sailor and as a military tactician. Significantly, he was the only member of the inner circle besides the Oregonian, Vice President Jenner, who had any reservations about Operation Strikeout. Not about the actual idea of invading the Republic itself, but concerns about the increasingly slipshod way in which it was being done.

  The same could not be said of Secretary of State David “Gator” Modlin. Modlin was a pipsqueak, a little man with watery eyes, a weak chin, and football moustache comprising eleven hairs on each side. He had never actually served in the military himself. No one quite knew how such an ineffectual individual had ever gained the nickname of “Gator.” In fact, Modlin had bestowed it on himself, and regularly paid media people under the counter to use it. He was a total political timeserver who had slithered his way to the top, because he had never found a single moneyed and politically powerful ass so rotten or so odoriferous that he would not apply his lips to it. Modlin bullied and hectored his subordinates, firing and transferring them for no reason other than the fact that they irritated him in some way, while at the same time he groveled to the president and anyone who might be in a position to hurt or help him.

  Secretary of Northwest Recovery Janet Chalupiak was a six-foot-two, 280-pound lesbian with a face like a buffalo, and burning eyes, which gave away the fact that she was very nearly insane. In her youth, before the War of Independence, she had been a student at the University of Montana. There she and the late Linda Barnard, not yet a full professor, had conducted a lengthy liaison. The two of them had scratched each other’s backs by each filing sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuits against White male faculty members whom the other viewed as standing in their way. Both men were stripped of tenure and their lives and careers ruined, and one of them committed suicide when his wife left him. Linda moved up and got the dead man’s tenure. Janet received a poke full of cash from the university’s settlement, a brilliant academic record and a job recommendation to the Justice Department that got the lesbian lass the hell out of Red Lodge, and she had never looked back.

  The whole experience had been deliciously empowering, and when Janet heard in the months after Longview that Linda had been hanged by Force 101, it sent her into a frenzy of hatred and lust for revenge against everything in the world that was white, male, heterosexual and thereby evil. It was Janet Chalupiak who had begun a program of selected assassinations within the Northwest Republic several years before. ONR agents had conducted a short campaign of shooting, sniping, and car-bomb attacks in the name of a non-existent group called “Northwest Rainbow,” allegedly seeking reunification with the United States. Several county sheriffs, judges, and Party officials had been murdered as well as some of their family members. BOSS and the Civil Guard’s CID quickly tracked down and eliminated the terrorists, with the help of an enraged and alert populace who left the ONR ops no place to run or hide. Then it was the Republic’s turn. ONR’s excursion into assassination provoked such severe retaliation from Olympia, including a car bomb that killed a Commerce Secretary and Janet’s own deputy director, who had been found garroted in her home, that she had been ordered by the president and the rest of the cabinet to stop before things got out of hand. Now nursing a sense of grievance against the administration she felt had failed to have her back in her personal vendetta against the Northwest Republic, Janet Chalupiak was the most impassioned backer of Operation Strikeout.

  Rounding off the team was the obligatory Strong Black Woman, one specimen of whom had become a traditional feature of every administration since Condoleezza Rice. It was customary to give each “Condi” a big office in the West Wing and pile her desk up with huge stacks of reports on iron ore production in Outer Mongolia, or Pentagon war game scenarios involving an Italian blockade of the Faroe Islands, so forth and so on. Usually the SBW would spend a few weeks trying to wade through it all and pretending that she had a clue, then she would get the message and leave her office and the mountain of crap on her desk gathering dust, while she hit the talk shows and cocktail parties, the state dinners and photo-op circuit for the rest of the administration. Meanwhile the faceless white drudges in the pastel shirts and ties who actually had some idea of what they were doing handled all the actual policy wonk stuff.

  But Kanesha Knight had seen Foxy Brown over 30 times as a little girl, so she wanted to be a spy. In exchange for keeping the Black Congressional Congress in line for ONI for some years, when her turn came to be Condi she demanded and got the job of director of the CIA. Always overrated as an intelligence agency from the very time of its equally overrated OSS origins, the once famed Company had by now been almost entirely supplanted in the foreign humintel field by other agencies or what were euphemistically known as “subcontracting non-governmental organizations,” i.e. mercenaries who were paid piecework rates for hard results and who were therefore incentivized to do some actual spying and get the real scoop. The CIA did nothing much anymore these days except collate these mercenaries’ data and perform satellite photo analysis; the actual heavy lifting of spying on the Northwest Republic was done by the Office of Northwest Recovery, some military analysts, some NGOs and also by a few free agents, some of them kooky Christian Zionist “volunteers” who actually served something of a purpose, since they wasted more of BOSS’s time than all the other actual spying combined.

  So Kanesha had been given the CIA, providing a standard affirmative action two-fer, black skin and tits, and thus the ritual proof of Hunter Wallace’s love of diversity and the Gorgeous Mosaic. At first, she had done little harm, but then Kanesha accidentally found out about Operation Strikeout and the command conferences and she wanted in, having a vague notion that invading somewhere was something the CIA needed to be involved in. She threatened to file a sexual and racial discrimination lawsuit against the administration if she were not included in the strategy meetings.

  This forced the administration to a hasty decision as to whether to admit Kanesha to the Situation Room and risk her blabbing off at the bubble lips, or have her assassinated in order to make sure the secrecy of Strikeout was not compromised. After some nattering with Angela Herrin, Ronald Schiff, and Janet Chalupiak, Hunter Wallace decided to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. He would include Kanesha in the planning phase, and give her some make-work to do. He would go behind her back and retain some properly instructed and remunerated CIA personnel over at Langley to keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t totally blow the gaff on Operation Strikeout. Then about three weeks before the invasion, Wallace would have Kanesha whacked by the special duty detail of Secret Servicemen that American presidents traditionally used for such janitorial work since the Vince Foster episode back in the 90s. Wallace’s hit squad was headed by his own personal bodyguard, the formidable former Detroit linebacker, Jimbo Hadding. Kanesha’s assassination would of course be laid to the door of the dreaded WPB as part of the ongoing low-level grab-assing between the two nations’ agencies that had recently escalated, thanks to Janet Chalupiak. Her death would become the official excuse for the very invasion itself.

  So the rest of the inner Strikeout circle, who were all in on the secret of her coming demise, put up with Kanesha Knight’s presence at the meetings, dressed to the nines and reeking of the perfume she apparently sloshed over her body by the quart. They listened to her endless babble on a variety of topics of which she had no understanding at all, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn’t have to put up with her for too much longer.

  It was difficult for them to refrain from laughing, though, when she went on about the aliens. About a year before, some humoris
t in the WPB’s black ops branch in Olympia had worked up a project wherein the CIA was carefully fed a line of disinformation through foreign sources regarding Project Bluelight, Doctor Joseph Cord’s plasma anti-aircraft weapon, which was then just going into the prototype stage. The Circus knew that the CIA knew about the project, they just weren’t sure what it was. The disinformation was to the effect that after Longview the NDF had captured a secret U.S. government installation in Wyoming which housed remains of wrecked UFOs and laboratories where scientists were trying to reverse engineer the extraterrestrial technology, and that the plasma weapons were the result of this technology. The wicked white scientists had of course defected to the Republic, recycling the old Operation Paperclip liberal narrative, and they had now possibly succeeded in putting the horrible Nazi regime in Olympia into contact with the aliens who had originally visited earth in the UFOs. Therefore, it would not be a good idea for the United States to attack the Northwest Republic, because a flying saucer might appear over the White House and blow it up.

  The WPB’s analyst had intended for this rumor to be a “glow-worm,” in intelligence parlance a deliberately created canard or red herring serving two purposes, to sow confusion and misdirection, and also to track and see where it went, how far and how fast, and where it eventually turned up. But Kanesha Knight had been reading supermarket tabloids since she was a child, she was an absolute believer in UFOs, and she was now expending a good deal of the resources of the CIA on trying to identify where the secret base with the alien technology had been and what it might have contained. The CIA analysts she had assigned to the job quickly figured out that the boss had been gulled by the WPB, but since no one dared to tell her and risk loss of career, they spent their days in their cubicles playing computer games or day-trading on the stock market, and writing up bogus reports based on internet UFO web sites.

  “Can we at least set the date, Mister President?” asked Admiral Brava. “I vote for June 21st, the longest day of the year. We might as well give our boys the maximum amount of daylight to fight by.”

  “Joshua prayed to the Lord and stopped the sun in the sky, so the Children of Israel could keep on fighting,” said Kanesha Knight, her exquisite enunciation reflecting the common negroid misconception that pronouncing clearly was the same as speaking intelligently.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, could you refresh my memory? What army group is Joshua commanding again?” asked Vice President Jenner politely.

  “I’m holding off on that until the last minute,” said President Wallace with gravity. “No one can betray what even I don’t know.” While this was clearly true, Wallace made it sound profound. From his early days as a Cognitive Dissonance blogger, Hunter Wallace had mastered the art of speaking and writing deeply, profoundly, and impressively, while saying nothing. He could and often did write a two-thousand word article or make an hour-long speech that imparted not one single idea or piece of information, and yet he made it sound so good that it was hours before his audience realized they’d been stroked, and many of them never did—enough to keep voting him into office, at any rate. It was his greatest asset, one that every politician in a democracy must hone to razor sharpness: the art of baffling with bullshit where he could not dazzle with brilliance.

  “Can we assume June 21st as a ballpark date, Mister President?” persisted Brava wearily. “A guesstimate? A definite maybe?”

  “Perhaps,” said Hunter Wallace with an enigmatic smile. Brava gave up; they’d had this discussion many times before and by now it was almost routine, like the opening gambit of a chess match. The point of the running game for Brava, Jenner, and Chalupiak was to pry as much information and possibly even a decision or two out of President Wallace without landing themselves too deeply in the excremental matter. The trick was to offer him credible deniability so that if anything Wallace “suggested” went wrong, it would be officially someone else’s idea. The problem was that electronic audio-visual minutes were being kept off the videocam at one end of the table, and it was a lot harder to wiggle out of something once it is recorded for all time as having been spoken, than it was back in the days of simple written minutes.

  Now Jenner gave Brava a subtle nod. “Mister President,” said Brava, “I would like to re-visit the question of a fourth front along the northern part of the I-Five corridor. There is still time to transfer at least two strategic bomber wings to Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage, and send at least ten mechanized brigades and six or seven infantry brigades to Fort Greely and Fort Wainwright. The troops can then move quietly down to the border so they can launch a co-ordinated fourth prong down through British Columbia and over into the Repub—I mean, the racist entity, at Bellingham. Then they drive right on to Seattle and Olympia. It will be midsummer, and the weather in Alaska will be perfect for a move like that. The Canadian government has already given its permission for us to use their territory as a springboard for the invasion. What could be the problem with getting them on board for an additional maneuver like this?”

  “Well, let’s go over it again, since apparently you weren’t listening the first four or five times,” said Wallace irritably. “You’re a military man, Admiral Brava, and presumably you know how to read a map. I suggest you look at one of the Puget Sound area, where you will notice something interesting. The city of Vancouver, Canada, is practically right on top of enemy territory, as North American distances go. A man with an especially powerful bladder and a good wind behind him can piss in Seattle and hit downtown Vancouver. It is so close that the Nazi intelligence school on Whidbey Island occasionally takes trainees out on live infiltration exercises to Victoria and Vancouver, much to the disgust of those clowns at CSIS and the RCMP, who have yet to catch a single one of them. They’re tired of getting theater ticket and valet parking stubs from Nanaimo and Surrey showing up on their desks with Whidbey Island postmarks, especially since there is no legal mail service between Canada and the racist entity, and neither force has any idea who’s getting into their office to hand-deliver the letters. But to return to the subject, our racist buddies have a little something called the V-Three rocket. It’s actually more of a rocket-boosted glider. It’s very low-tech, doesn’t even have an onboard guidance system…”

  “Which means there is nothing we can jam, so we either shoot them down or they deliver their payload,” said Brava. “Yes, sir, I am familiar with the V-Three. They are slow compared to a Cruise missile, but four hundred and fifty miles per hour on launch and approximately the same speed coming in after burnout is still hard to hit without a high-tech defense system or a jet fighter. You can’t shoot one of the damned things down with small arms. They are comparatively cheap to manufacture, and our satellite and ground reports indicate that the NAR…”

  “The racist homophobic entity!” shrieked Janet Chalupiak. “There is no Republic of anything up there, and if you say that it sounds like you’re talking about a real country!”

  “All right, let’s revert back to the modus vivendi we reached the last time, and just call it the Emerald City,” said Brava wearily.

  “Fair enough,” said Hunter Wallace magnanimously. “The Emerald City and its band of naughty munchkins are manufacturing more of these V-Threes even as we speak. They’ve gone on a V-Three spree, see?” He giggled. “These weapons are capable of lifting a thousand-kilogram payload. That’s two thousand two hundred pounds, slightly over a ton, and that’s a lot of anthrax, a lot of phosgene or mustard gas, or a lot of just plain high explosive. They have a range of over four hundred miles, depending on the wind, but that means that from their firing platforms in southern Oregon they can hit San Francisco and Sacramento with no trouble.”

  “They have no accuracy at all. They can’t even be aimed properly,” sniffed Dave “Gator” Modlin.

  “No, they can’t,” agreed Hunter Wallace. “But they can hit something the size of a city, somewhere in town. Just a ton of bad shit, disease or explosive or incendiary white phosphorus, dropping randomly out of the
sky. In a way, that’s a more effective terror weapon than a smart bomb or guided missile that one can avoid by staying away from obvious targets. The Nazis don’t call them Flying Bombs for nothing. Now, with a range of over four hundred miles, let us ask ourselves, where else can these flying murder machines hit with total ease? And the prize goes to—Vancouver, Canada! Yes, Vancouver, home of the largest Chinese and other Asian population on the North American continent. Millions of helpless victims for genocidal racist monsters to slaughter, simply for having the wrong color skin. For some reason, the Canadian prime minister doesn’t want that to happen. He seems to feel that it might impede his party’s chances in the next general election.”

  “It doesn’t signify, Mister President,” said Janet Chalupiak. “All of the Nazi rocket launching bases will be wiped out by the Air Force in the first hour after you give the order to go green. For heaven’s sake! The things are made out of wood and canvas!”

  “Well, some fiberglass as well,” said Kanesha Knight. “Fiberglass. I read that somewhere.”

  “Possibly in a report from your own agency?” replied Chalupiak, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

  “Ah, but can we absolutely guarantee that will happen?” said President Wallace. “I hate to sound skeptical of our Air Force, who have the best planes and the best pilots in the world, and I am sure that General Bellows is correct when he assures us that all those little annoying accuracy problems with the Cruise and Tomahawks and Predators have been ironed out. They should be, since it now costs almost fifty million dollars for us to fire even a single one. But can we absolutely guarantee that a single V-Three full of phosgene won’t land in Vancouver once the racists detect American troops passing through British Columbia, coming to take away their shitty little country? I think not, and neither does Prime Minister Simoneau. The Canadian government wants full plausible deniability until after the racist entity has been defeated and occupied, then they want to step forward and take their modest bow for having helped democracy triumph. They don’t want the bad men taking any potshots at the Jewel of the Western Orient. That means no Canadian ground troops and all Canadian assistance has to stay on the QT until it’s safe to acknowledge their contribution.”