Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “I’m not convinced that all five million of those armed racists are going to simply throw down their weapons and cower in holes while the bombs fall,” said Battaglia. “These aren’t Iraqis or Muslim peasants in Bumfuckistan who have never seen a flush toilet. These are Americans, goddammit! Most of them, anyway.”

  “Run down what we know of their probable defense strategy again, Al?” asked Brava.

  “They don’t use divisions like we do, except in the Special Service, the SS, which is their élite spearhead force,” Scheisskopf told them. “The basic fighting unit of the NDF ground forces is the regiment, consisting of three regular battalions that number around 700 men each. In time of war, as many as ten extra battalions of reservists will bring an infantry regiment to full combat strength, which can be as high as nine thousand men. Each battalion in turn has six companies: four infantry companies, one support company of quartermasters and medics and technicians, and one heavy weapons company. The heavy weapons company usually consists of light artillery in the form of 75-millimeter or 88-millimeter anti-tank and anti-personnel guns, vehicle-mounted recoilless rifles and twin .50-calibers, and a few armored assault vehicles, so every battalion packs a heavier punch than just small arms. In addition to which, batteries of an actual artillery battalion can be attached to line battalions in the field, as can any other damned thing like these death rays, if they exist. Those 88-mil self-propelled guns are going to give us problems, especially our armor. They’re based on the German World War Two version, but everything about them has been updated and modernized. They have an accurate range of over eight miles, in a war that will be fought over a lot of open country, and their SuperSemtex shells can disable even our heaviest tanks.

  “An NDF infantry battalion is organized, trained, and used tactically as a self-contained and self-sustaining unit.” Scheisskopf continued. “In essence, when we go across that border we aren’t going to be facing two or three enemy armies, we will be facing hundreds of small armies of between seven hundred and a thousand men each, all capable of acting independently, striking independently or else coordinating with other units, striking, and then dispersing. We will have the same problem on land that the Navy will have with Task Force Soaring Eagle and all those little torpedo boats and whatnot the Northmen have invested in. We’ll be the biggest and meanest motherfuckers in the valley of death, but we’ll be facing not a handful sharks, but a school of piranhas. The terrain will favor them—lots of room for maneuver on the plains and lots of ravines and forests and valleys for ambushes in the mountain country. Not to mention the fact that the Northmen have spent over a decade training those very units we’ll be going up against all over that very terrain, so they’ll have home ground advantage. We will win, Hector. Our satellites will tell us every move they make and our air power will ensure that they have nothing left to fight with or for. I don’t believe in alien death rays, and there’s no way they can shoot down B-52s at thirty-thousand feet with souped-up civvie prop jobs. But it’s not going to be a cakewalk. It’s going to be a long and drawn-out bloody mess, we are going to lose a lot of people, and it will go on until the Stability Force can get most of the racists dead and corral the rest, ship them out and disperse them. Then we can bring in loyal and diverse American communities to re-settle the Northwest.”

  “You know that the unofficial word is that there won’t be many civvies left to ship out?” asked Brava.

  Scheisskopf shrugged. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You rebel against the United States of America, the greatest country in the world, then you pay the price. I just don’t like the price we’re going to be paying because our commander-in-chief, uh… well, you know.”

  “We know,” said Brava with a sigh.

  * * *

  When he wasn’t handling Georgia for Operation Belladonna, Richie from Chicago spent the month of May doing his day job as a buttlegger and beeflegger in the District of Columbia Green Zone. Even in this comparatively safe and prosperous environment, what he saw made him sick, and confirmed that everything he remembered from the old American days in Montana and everything he had learned in school about the revolution and the reasons for it was true.

  He hand-delivered cartons of cigarettes and boxes of cigars to the homes and offices of Congressmen and Senators and major government functionaries who gave stirring speeches to the media and on the legislative floor about the evils of tobacco and the nobility of a cruelty-free vegetarian diet, then snuck out onto their private balconies for a steak or fried chicken dinner discreetly prepared in one of the many covert private kitchens that had been set up throughout every government office building, topped off with a cigarette or a luxurious Cohiba or Macanudo. Bob had no objection to tobacco, although he chose not to smoke himself because of the real health risks, and he considered the ban on meat to be simply one more bit of madness in a society that had clearly gone insane. But the level of sheer hypocrisy in America stunned him; more than once he had made deliveries right at the Department of Health, which was responsible for enforcing the bans, and he had walked down corridors to the sound and smell of sizzling bacon from one of the break room kitchens, to hand over cartons of smokes to officials who had the power to arrest him on the spot for breaking the same law they were breaking themselves. It was bizarre.

  He quickly learned not to watch American television. It seemed to consist of nothing but gibbering, bubble-lipped black faces shouting obscenities, and naked people of all races and genders committing indiscriminate acts of perversion with each other, with animals, and with assorted inanimate objects. That and Spanish soap operas. Occasionally he watched one of the so-called news broadcasts, which consisted of slavish adulatory puff pieces about President Hunter Wallace and certain selected political celebrities of the One Nation Indivisible persuasion, as well as alleged news stories that Bob knew full well to be either false, misleading, or pure fantasy. “News stopped being news here a long time ago,” Cardinale explained to him. “It’s just another form of entertainment.”

  Bob did occasionally watch what purported to be news stories and documentaries about the Northwest Republic. He was tempted simply to laugh, but it really wasn’t funny, because he came to understand that most people actually believed this drivel, or if they didn’t, then they didn’t dare to say so. Apparently, people in the Northwest were all either A) starving and on the brink of revolting against the Party because of the economic sanctions, or B) dying of heart attacks and hardened arteries from gorging on Montana beef, Washington chicken, and Oregon dairy products. He learned to his amazement that the Republic had forbidden anyone to use white plastic garbage bags because it “showed disrespect for the white master race,” and they were required to use black. (In real life, no one in the Republic used plastic garbage bags at all, of any color, because they were wasteful, and there were better uses for the country’s polyethylene manufacturing capabilities. Organic waste was collected for fertilizer in the notorious “honey wagons” of Northwest song and humor, while beverage containers were of glass, steel, and aluminum and were recycled.)

  Bob learned from American TV that the Bureau of State Security was the great bugaboo in the Northwest, an all-powerful and all-seeing secret police who were “licensed to kill,” who tyrannized folks and arrested them for listening to a song by a black “artist” on their computer, so forth and so on. Bob knew damned well that was a lie, because he was a Guard himself back home, and as a member of the CID detective force, he had occasionally worked with BOSS.

  There were around a hundred BOSS agents throughout the entire Northwest Republic. The BOSS office in Missoula consisted of a man in older middle age, Major Leonard Painting, and four agents who covered the eastern part of the NAR in Montana and occasionally lent a hand down in Wyoming when necessary. Painting seemed more interested in fly-fishing and building carpentry items in his garage workshop; he had made an actual cradle for Bob Three, which Ida had inherited when she came along. He almost never wore
the plain black BOSS uniform without insignia, except on formal occasions like October 22nd and April the 20th, but he did wear the Old NVA rosette, the Battle of Portland ribbon, and the Consolidation ribbon on his civilian shirts. Painting never talked about the old days, and he came across as a mild-mannered old duffer, but Bob’s NVA brother-in-law Jason Stockdale once told Bob a story about Painting from that time which caused him to treat the older man with a respect amounting to awe.

  Once Painting had talked about BOSS in a general way. “Yeah, it’s true; we’re pretty much above the law. It’s in the Constitution, in fact. We’re authorized to take whatever action we consider necessary to safeguard the existence of the Republic, because it has to be that way. Evil people want us all dead, my boy, and sometimes the white man needs a blunt instrument to deal with that. It is the highest calling in racial service. We have a motto that hangs in our office: We have to win every time. The Jews only have to win once. Not a man or woman gets their button in this organization unless and until they are known to possess the necessary intelligence, patriotism, and judgment to exercise power like that for the good of all. Every one of us has served in the regular military or the police, no exception. You want to join BOSS? I’ll be glad to give you a recommendation, in about ten years’ time, when I’ve been able to give you a good long looking over, and I know that you will not ever commit a single act in your life that is not in the service of this country and the mighty fine race of people who live in it.”

  One night Bob caught a show on TV involving BOSS agents allegedly arresting a beautiful young woman for falling in love with a negro online, dragging her away to a cellar, and subjecting her to sickeningly graphic sexual torture. He turned it off in a rage and ranted about it the next day to Vincent Cardinale. “Yeah, I remember that show,” he said. “They’re re-running it?”

  “On the Drama Channel,” said Bob.

  “I’m surprised. I thought they got the message.”

  “What?” asked Bob.

  “They did that shit in secret,” Cardinale told him. “All of the credits at the end were phony names, but we found out who they were. The scriptwriter and the producer were Jews, big surprise, and the director was some fag. They did it out of New York, again big surprise. Our station up there tracked them down and cacked the kikes, threw one of them out of a thirty-story window and shot the second one in an underground parking garage in Tribeca. They broke into the faggot’s apartment, cut his balls off, and Fed-Exed them to the network’s producer. I’ll let our guys up there know some idiot at Drama Channel re-ran it. Betcha they don’t do it again.”

  Bob met with Georgia at least once a week in the Zombie Master’s office to debrief her during her alleged “therapy” sessions, and in a sense, they were indeed therapeutic, although not for Bob so much. What Wallace was doing to her made Bob want to scream out loud and rip Wallace’s face off with his bare hands, but what chilled him was the way Georgia seemed simply to accept it as a kind of sexual variety. He found it best to steer clear of the whole subject whenever possible. He and the Master concentrated on gently pumping Georgia, going over every minute of her days in the White House and getting from her everything and everyone she saw, heard, overheard, or simply sensed as a vibe.

  The mine of information that could be obtained purely from someone wandering around the corridors of power was incredible. Within several sessions the WPB knew who on the Joint Chiefs of Staff was in charge of what aspects of Operation Strikeout, how many HE and bio-war missiles each submarine was packing (24 each, half targetable Cruises and half biological warheads), and at least half of the specific Army and Marine combat brigades that would be used in Groups North, Center, and South. They learned that the Americans had heard rumors of Bluelight, but that Kanesha Knight’s alien obsession had turned the whole subject into something of a joke, and there was a tendency to write the whole subject off as a canard. Georgia could not pick up anything that indicated any concern as to the vulnerability of the American spy satellite network, and the Special Planning Group in Olympia took comfort in the fact. More importantly, they learned that Vice President Hugh Jenner and Admiral Hector Brava were not fully on board with the whole invasion, or at least its details, and they were regarded as Eeyores, to the extent that Wallace was seriously considering relieving Brava of his post and dropping Jenner from the ONI ticket at the convention.

  Most importantly, at the end of one session, Georgia passed on something she had overheard from one of the stalls in the West Wing ladies’ room, when Angela Herrin had stepped in to take a call from someone, and had referred to something called the Apocalypse Option. “What’s that?” asked Bob

  Georgia frowned. “Bob, I’m not sure—but I think it’s a plan they have to use nuclear weapons against the Republic if things start going bad for the United States once the war begins.”

  “Holy Christ!” muttered the Zombie Master under his breath.

  “Georgia, what exactly did the Herrin woman say? And do you have any idea who she was talking to?” Bob asked her urgently.

  “No idea, but she lapsed into some funny language at times. Not Yiddish. I know the sound of Yiddish, Marvin babbles in it to his Jewish friends. Never heard it before, something with a lot of hisses and throaty noises like she was trying to hock a lugie.”

  “Hebrew,” said the Master grimly. “Herrin is really Herrnstein, and she was born and raised in Israel. So she was speaking to another Israeli. Maybe even her real boss.”

  “Georgia, what did she say in English?” prodded Bob gently. “Every word, as exactly as you can remember.”

  “Okay, I think I can give it to you pretty much verbatim,” Georgia responded. “She said, ‘I’ve tried to get him to kick off with Apocalypse, not just hold it in reserve for a worst-case scenario, so we can kill millions of the Jew-hating schmucks right off the bat, but he’s concerned the radiation will mess up Vancouver and get the Canucks all pissed off, plus he’s worried it will freak out the goyim and fuck up his re-election. Yes, I’ve told him that. We control the voting machines and it doesn’t matter what the hell the goyim really vote like, but he’s worried about his legacy, that kind of dreck. I tried to get him on board with the expense aspect, told him it will cost too much and bankrupt the country to ship all the millions of racists to Antarctica, because we’ll have to at least make some show of building them shelters and feed them something, shit like that, and since we’re sending them there to die anyway, why not just fry their pig-eating asses and have done with it? But he keeps trying to play political angles. He’s agreed to keep the Apocalypse card up his sleeve in case these stupid Pentagon schmendricks can’t beat a few racist Davy Crocketts and their squirrel guns. I’ll keep on pushing it.” Most of it was in Hebrew, or whatever the language was. Oh, yeah, I remember one phrase she used when she hung up. Am Yiz Roll Kye.”

  “Am Yisroel Chai,” said the Zombie Master. “It means ‘Israel must live.’ God damn them!”

  “Georgia, I know I promised that we wouldn’t ask you to fish for specific information, because it’s so dangerous,” Bob told her carefully. “But surely you must realize how important it is that we learn everything we can about this so-called Apocalypse Option. I won’t ask you to put yourself at risk, just keep your eyes and ears extra wide open.”

  “We’ve got ten minutes left, Georgia,” said the Zombie Master kindly. “I suppose I’d better use it to do what the government is paying me twelve hundred dollars an hour for. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m scared all the time,” she admitted. “I wish—I wish I could see you more, Bobby.”

  “I wish I could too, Peanut, but you’re under Secret Service surveillance,” he told her. “If I do more than drop off your smokes occasionally, they’re going to wonder about me and start digging around.”

  “Keeping off the booze and the weed?” the shrink asked her.

  “Yeah, although it’s hard. I’m spending more time over at Mom’s house. The nanny is a nice lady
from Guatemala, and she lets me play with Allura. I know I have to do this for her, so she can Go Home and she won’t turn into someone like me. That has to happen. Bobby, remember what you said about the old NVA asking for twenty-four hours when a Volunteer was caught, before he or she broke under torture? I’ve thought about it, and I think I can do it, for Allura. Promise me, Bobby, if I get caught, you’ll use that twenty-four hours to get Allura away from there and take her home to Montana. It’s too late for me, but not for her. Promise me, Bobby!”

  “It’s not too late for you, and you’ll both Go Home,” said Bob firmly.

  “Yeah, and we’ll live happily ever after.”

  “You will,” he said with a nod.

  “Bobby, that’s the nicest piece of pure bullshit anybody ever said to me. You’re sweet.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I mean it. Promise me. Allura goes Home, no matter what.”

  “I promise,” he told her.

  XIII

  CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE ABSURD KIND

  (D-Day minus 3 days)

  Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.