Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “That’s one reason we haven’t hit New York and D.C. with alternate warfare,” Cardinale went on. “The second reason is so we can scare the hell out of the remaining responsible elements in this country and make sure that after we have well and truly whipped them down into jelly, when Red Morehouse generously offers to call off the dogs, he has a stick as well as a carrot to offer. We need to make it clear to the ruling élite of the United States that we are entirely capable of destroying what they have left, and if they want to keep it, they’d damned well better make peace on whatever terms our State President decides to offer them, when the time comes. And it will.”

  “But you’re planning some attacks here?” persisted Campbell. “I’m in, sir. I mean it. The invaders have been stopped, but they’re still on our soil. My family is in Montana, and I have no idea what’s happened to them. I keep thinking of Millie and my children in… in some kind of situation…” Bob clenched his fist, hard. “I’m here and I can’t help them. I should be out there in Anaconda with my X-3, making damned sure those animals don’t get anywhere near them. But if I can’t shoot them like a soldier I’ll damned sure gas them or poison them!”

  “I get that, son,” said Cardinale with a nod. “But you in turn need to get that right now, you among all our millions of soldiers are doing the one thing that might be the most important job of any one of us, the mission that might save us all. You are helping that brave girl in that cesspit on Pennsylvania Avenue tell us what those murderers are up to in time for us to stay one step ahead of them. By warning us of those paratroop drops alone, she saved thousands of Northwest lives. Now, how is the Beautiful Lady holding up?”

  “She’s running on raw nerves and God knows what else,” said Bob grimly. “She’s losing weight and she’s starting to look haggard around the eyes and mouth from not sleeping. She’s admitted to me that sometimes the urge to light up a joint at least, or to start drinking again, is becoming almost overwhelming. The stress is getting to her. The White House is full of new security procedures, all kinds of strange spooks from half a dozen agencies roaming up and down the halls, huddled over computers in cubbyholes and whispering to one another in corners. They’re getting more and more frantic and paranoid, the clearer it becomes each day that the United States is losing the war. They’re looking for scapegoats. The FBI is re-vetting everybody who works at Sixteen Hundred, complete new security workups and background checks. Georgia being born in Montana is raising eyebrows again, and she thinks the Secret Service is trying to get her kicked out before her contract is up. That head agent, the ex-Fattie, Lyons, has never liked her being there. Fortunately, she was completely clean from their point of view until I knocked on her door a couple of months ago. They’d just finished going over her background with a fine-toothed comb. They found a lot of bad craziness but nothing political, and that’s all they’ll find now.”

  “The possible relapse into drugs and booze worries the hell out of me,” said Cardinale. “It worries the hell out of Jake Shapira, too.”

  “It really sounds funny referring to a comrade by a Jewish name,” said Campbell, shaking his head in bemusement. “When this is all over, somebody needs to tell me the doc’s real name.”

  “I don’t know it, and he may not remember it,” said Cardinale. “Out Here you can end up losing yourself in your cover and forgetting who you really are. No kidding. I’ve been Vinnie Skins for so long that I swear I have these vague memories of my childhood in New Jersey that never happened. Be glad you’re only Out Here for the short term. When you get back Home, you may find yourself thinking and acting like Richie for a while. I hope your wife is understanding.”

  “I don’t know what she’d think of Richie the Buttlegger, but I damned sure know what she’ll say about these tattoos!” said Campbell, lifting his be-Lila’ed arm. “Speaking of which, I know we’re not supposed to act curious about fellow team members, but Betsy’s let some things slip over the past couple of months that give me the impression there’s a story there. She said once she’s never even been back Home since she was a kid. How is that possible? I mean, she’d have to go back to go through SoI on Whidbey Island, at least?”

  “Betsy never went to SoI,” said Cardinale, shaking his head. “We recruited her locally. Fortunately for us, she’s turned out to be a natural. Yeah, there’s a story there, and I suppose you ought to know it, just so you don’t end up putting your foot in it with her. She’s from a little town out in eastern Washington called Wheeler, or it was called Wheeler. It was out near Moses Lake somewhere.”

  “Was?” asked Bob.

  “Yeah, was. It’s gone now,” Cardinale told him, “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dynamited all the buildings, burned what they could, and bulldozed the rubble into a landfill during the last year of the war. I don’t know if the Republic ever rebuilt it. The NVA had an active company out there, attached to the Yakima Brigade. Can’t remember the details, never got down that way myself, but that particular crew specialized in whacking Indians. They used to leave cards at their hits saying it was revenge for Kennewick Man or some such. They shot some self-proclaimed chief of the Hunkapoop tribe or whatever, coming out of the liquor store just outside the res, of course. Turned out this redskin was a real favorite with the liberal media back east here, kind of their official Native American Mascot from the Racist Northwest.”

  “And here I thought we were all Native Americans, by virtue of being born here,” sneered Bob.

  “Not if you’re the wrong color, no,” said Cardinale. “Yeah, that one always used to get my back up as well. Anyway, when Chief Running Nose was sent to the happy hunting ground, there was all kinds of screaming and hollering about wicked white men completing the genocide of the noble red man, all that happy horseshit. The Volunteers who did the deed were out of reach, but the political pressure was on for the feds to do something, jump up and down and shit snowballs, whatever. So the FATPOs moved in and arrested the entire population of Wheeler, which was four or five hundred people, and deported them all to the FEMA camps in Nevada.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” said Bob, shaking his head. “I’ve heard of those camps. Let me guess. Was Betsy… ?”

  “She was,” said Cardinale grimly. “She was about thirteen at the time, so she was considered too old for It Takes a Village, her mind being already corrupted with wicked racism and the King James Bible, so forth and so on. So she got to go along for the ride. Betsy and her mother and her little brother were dragged out of their house around dawn and thrown into the back of an eighteen-wheeler along with about seventy other people, standing room only, and then they hit the road south. No stops along the way, at least not for the deportees. By the time the truck got to the camp in Pahrump, only about half of the people in the truck were still alive, and Betsy’s brother was dead. Heat and dehydration. The child was about six, I think. Betsy’s mother died a few months later of the same causes plus malnutrition, starvation, intermittent beatings, and occasional bouts of interracial gang rape at the hands of the guards, most of whom were nigger and Mexican military stockade inmates, acting as trusties under the so-called supervision of the army MPs. Once her mother died, Betsy was left there on her own. Do you want me to go on?”

  “No, sir,” said Campbell. “I’m sorry I asked. I won’t say anything to her to let on that I know. We all know some Mandingo older women back home. There’s a rule that we somehow get taught, but it’s so subtle that most of us can’t even remember where we learned it. I know I can’t.”

  “Say nothing, remember everything,” quoted Cardinale. “Yes, I’ve heard it, and it doesn’t just apply to Mandingo experiences. Anyway, Betsy ended up here in D.C. through a series of events I won’t get into, and we were lucky enough to pick her up. The reason Betsy has never been Home is that she feels she has nothing to go Home to.”

  “That’s not true, sir!” said Campbell sadly. “She has the land we made out of what we took from them to go home to. She can start over. That’s what the Re
public is there for, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Maybe someday she will,” said the older man. “Right now she doesn’t see it that way. She’s into the whole lifelong revenge thing, and you’re right, you do not talk to her about any of this. We can’t give that girl much in exchange for all she does for us, but we can damned sure give her respect!”

  * * *

  On the first day of July, White House Press Secretary Angela Herrin sat in the Oval Office with her shapely legs crossed, speaking to the President of the United States as if he were a small, stubborn child. “Mr. President, you must begin to think seriously about the Apocalypse Option,” she said. “The war so far has been an unmitigated disaster. Every day, half measures are being conclusively proven not to work. The effect on everything from our national morale to our economy has been catastrophic, not to mention the fact that your re-election prospects for a third term are now in serious jeopardy.”

  “My re-election is in the bag,” said Wallace with a confidence he did not really feel. “No nation is going to change horses in midstream in the middle of a major war like this.”

  Angela sighed. “Mr. President, you are speaking as if the actual vote totals in an American general election have any relevance to the result. We both know that hasn’t been the case for several generations.”

  White House Chief of Staff Ronald Schiff spoke up firmly. “Sir, you seem to be forgetting who counts the votes, and who constitutes the majority shareholders in the Diebold Corporation that manufactures and controls the voting machines, not to mention the fact that the CEO of Diebold is Mordecai Eshkol, an Israeli businessman who will not be impressed with any apparent lack of political will to deal with this Nazi abomination in the Pacific Northwest.”

  “What, so you guys are threatening me now?” demanded Wallace, a bit of bluster in his voice. “How soon they forget! I’ve been a friend of the Jewish people all my life, ever since I was running my own little racist internet operation back in the ’teens and voluntarily sending every name and address and bit of information I picked up to the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, just to let you know whose side I was on!”

  “We remember, and we’re very grateful, sir,” purred Angela. “But this is a crucial moment in our history, and we need for you to come through for us in the one way that will ultimately count. We need you to destroy our enemies for us. Think of your legacy, sir! You know how grateful we can be to those who come through for us when it counts. By 1940, Winston Churchill was a washed-up, brandy-soaked has-been, out of office and out of the mainstream, who was detested even by his own party as an amoral hack without a principle to his name. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on the verge of being impeached for trying to pack the Supreme Court with his own personal flunkies, even as he was reviled for having created the beginnings of a welfare state that, even then, wise heads knew would lead to serious trouble and danger to the nation someday, while at the same time he failed to end the Great Depression. But those men came through for the Jewish people and took down Hitler for us, and so to this day, they are regarded as veritable saints throughout the entire civilized world. It’s just smart politics to stay on the right side of the people who control and shape the narrative, and who write the history books, or nowadays the history movies and TV.”

  “Senator Nivens has already indicated to us in private that he would be in favor of using the Apocalypse Option,” remarked Schiff casually.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Wallace irritably. “I give the order to nuke the Northwest or else the Jewish lobby will switch their support to Nivens at the One Nation Indivisible convention in August?”

  “You can’t win a third term if you’re not nominated, sir,” said Schiff with a truly Yiddish shrug of his shoulders.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t even know if the Apocalypse Option is on the table!” said Wallace. “These ray gun things have knocked down almost all the Cruise missiles that have been fired at the Northwest Republic, or entity, or sewing circle, or whatever we’re calling it this week. We don’t even know that nuclear ICBMs will get through! The nearest silos are in Kansas and Minnesota. That’s plenty of warning for the Nazis to focus those whatever-the-hell-they-are weapons. So once we’ve shot our final bolt and it fails, what then?”

  “How will you look to the country by August, by which time you will have lost at least one of the armies you sent into the Northwest completely and maybe all three, and there may be Nazi tanks rolling toward the convention hall in Chicago?” asked Angela urgently. “Sir, I know a nuclear strike will be a hard sell, but hard sells are what you do best! Your speech to the convention must be a victory speech!”

  “And what about the ray guns?” asked Wallace.

  “I admit, we don’t even know if Apocalypse will work now,” said Angela. “There’s only one way to find out. We fire our entire nuclear arsenal at all their cities, maybe two dozen each on Seattle and Portland to make sure at least one gets through, multiple missiles against lesser cities like Spokane and Boise and Eugene and Corvallis, you get the idea.”

  Wallace scowled. “What about the fallout and collateral damage of a nuclear hit on Seattle to Vancouver, British Columbia? How do you think Prime Minister Simoneau and the international community will react to that? How about all those Jews you mentioned who live in Vancouver, all those Israeli survivors you were so worried about being traumatized?”

  “The Jewish community in Vancouver is being quietly evacuated, and has been since the beginning of the war,” replied Schiff calmly.

  Wallace almost let fly with a remark about rats leaving a sinking ship, but he choked it back through lifelong force of habit. “Okay, how about Montana and northern Idaho? What about our own troops who are dug in and surrounded and outnumbered by enemy armies, troops we can’t even resupply because we can’t reach them by air or by ground? Hundreds of thousands of men, and the biggest problem isn’t even combat casualties. Do you know that Scheisskopf estimates Group South can hold out for less than a week on what food and water they have remaining, and the other two armies at Fairfield and Ponderay are in just as bad a shape? What about them?”

  “Give them a Fourth of July present, Mr. President!” urged Angela, her eyes sparkling at the thought of mass slaughter of anti-Semites. “Launch America’s nuclear arsenal of democracy on the birthday of our nation!” (Angela was forgetting for the moment that she had been born in Israel.) “At the same time the mushroom clouds go up, order a massive breakout offensive on the part of all three of our besieged army groups! The Nazis will be in shock and awe, reeling from the destruction of their cities and their industries and their families! Maybe God will even stop the sun in its tracks once more so our godel hadorim can keep on killing the Jew-hating bastards!”

  “You want me to order a massive nuclear strike against the Northwest on the Fourth of July?” laughed Wallace. “I have to admit, that would be one hell of a fireworks display!”

  There was a knock on the door of the Oval Office. “Yes?” called Wallace, Georgia Myers walked into the room. “Five o’clock, Mr. President,” she announced pertly, as if she were reminding him of a perfectly ordinary appointment. “I see you’re busy. Want me to come back?”

  “Give us ten more minutes, Ms. Halberstam,” said Wallace, as if she were a perfectly normal secretary.

  “Sure.” Georgia left, closing the door behind her, but when she had approached it had been slightly ajar, and she had heard Wallace’s last remark. She slipped into the ladies’ room down the hall, selected a stall on the end nearest the wall which she had carefully determined was out of range of the new camera installed by the Secret Service and DHS despite the ferocious protests of the female staff, and quickly texted out a coded message to Bob Campbell on her phone, which she concealed in a color picture of Snuffles, a pot-bellied given to President Wallace by a little girl in Iowa that had become the official White House mascot.

  “Shit!” said Campbell in his car, once he had decoded the me
ssage. He pulled over on his way to a barbecued chicken delivery to DuPont Circle long enough to pass the message on to Birdie, who passed it on to Vinnie Skins, who passed it on to Fort Lewis. The expletives that echoed through the NDF General Staff within the hour, on learning that the Jews now threatened their country with nuclear mass murder, were far stronger than Bob Campbell’s monosyllable. About two hours after Georgia had sent her text, Vincent Cardinale got a coded top priority order, on paper of all things, through an archaic device on his desk known in the late twentieth century as a fax machine. It was so old that the DHS and FBI no longer bothered to try and detect or decrypt fax-modulated land line signals; no one there remembered them, or remembered what to look for.

  Vinnie knew his own codes well enough so he didn’t have to use his key. The order was simple: We have to send a message. Cack those kikes.

  Cardinale nodded grimly, and quickly coded and sent his reply: It’s done.

  * * *

  Casualty summary: June 22nd-July 1st

  NDF military casualties—3,712 dead and 7,880 wounded

  NAR civilian casualties—1,912 dead and 3,740 wounded

  United States military casualties—25,909 dead and 19,336 wounded

  United States civilian casualties—101,456 dead and 302,348 wounded, gassed, or sickened from biowar agents, casualties overwhelmingly non-white

  Aztlan military casualties—Est. approx. 170,000 dead, 115,000 wounded

  Aztlan civilian casualties—Est. approx 261,500 dead, unknown number wounded, gassed, or sickened from biowar agents.

  XVII

  A PIECE OF THE FOX’S HIDE

  (D-Day plus 14 days)

  When the hide of the lion will not reach, it must be patched with that of the fox.

  —Lysandros of Sparta

  On the third day of July, the Northwest Republic’s State President, Red Morehouse, stood on a rise at the edge of the Lost Creek Forest in his camouflage fatigues. He slowly panned his binoculars over the besieged town in the distance. Morehouse could see the muzzle flashes of the Northwest army’s massed artillery firing all up and down the long valley, while inside the American-occupied town he could see the shells striking and flashing, and geysers of dirt and masonry and wreckage shooting high into the air, as well as occasional human bodies. Around Morehouse were parked the three Ground Hog-mounted projectors of a Bluelight battery, escorting his mobile command post to take care of any Predator drones or Tomahawk missiles that might amble by with the intent of whacking the Republic’s head of state. He was surrounded as well by the SS company from the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler that served as the presidential protection detail in time of war. But there was no enemy nearby. Bluelight had swept Hunter Wallace’s missiles and aircraft from the sky, and his soldiers were boxed in down in the valley, where they were being slowly slaughtered.