“The Nazis are hiring the mob to do their dirty work now?” asked Jenner, puzzled. “That doesn’t sound like them. I thought they were a lot more professional than that.”
“Maybe Carroll and Parris were subcontracting for somebody in the Circus,” suggested Lyons.
“Well, something weird is going on here,” said Jenner.
“I’m running enhanced checks on Carroll and Parris,” said Lyons. “We know the WPB has the capability of creating synthetics, people with fully verifiable cyber-IDs. They break into our databases like they were high school lockers and put whatever crap they want in there.” Lyons leaned over the desk and lowered his voice. “Sir, I have to ask—this morning, did you know she would do it when you let her into this office?”
“No, of course not,” said Jenner, shaking his head emphatically. “I hoped that she would dissuade the president through persuasion on a personal or yes, possibly sexual level.”
“That’s your story and you’re sticking to it?” said Lyons dryly. “You’re saying it never occurred to you that anyone Northwest intelligence was able to infiltrate this close to the center of government would very likely be not only a highly trained professional assassin quite capable of killing with anything that came to hand, but a Nazi fanatic perfectly willing to give up her own life in order to carry out her mission?”
“I do not recall any thoughts of the kind crossing my mind, no,” said Jenner. “And yes, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. May I suggest, Lee, that in view of the fact that we are in the middle of a severe national crisis, not to mention the fact that your career is on the line even more so than mine, we agree to pull together on this one and put together a narrative that makes some kind of sense, or can at least be spun to look like it makes sense? As deep in the shit as we find ourselves this afternoon, at least there are no mushroom clouds going up over Vancouver or poisoning American cities. Now we have a martyred president whom we can get almost endless mileage out of, if we play this right. I see no need for posterity ever to know that he was as crazy as a fucking loon!”
“And will the Northmen play along with your spin, sir?” asked Lyons skeptically.
“I don’t know,” said Jenner. “That’s one reason we need to start talking to them.” He pulled out a piece of paper from the desk. “I sent this to the Russian Embassy earlier, on the assumption that the Russkis are keeping in touch with their clients in the Northwest and that they would have some way to e-mail or fax it to Ray Ridgeway in Olympia. He’s their Finance Minister now in the NAR, and he’s an old acquaintance of mine from Portland—well, an old enemy, if you want to know the truth. Before the Trouble we spent most of our time trying to ruin each other, bankrupt each other, hijack one another’s companies through hostile takeovers, seduce each other’s wives, that kind of yuppie crap.”
“Why, sir?” asked Lyons. “What was the beef?”
“Mostly just boredom, the kind of bored you get when you’ve got all the money you’ll ever need and all the good things in life money can buy, so you just stir shit for the hell of it,” recalled Jenner with a sigh. “This ought to get him. I signify my willingness to eat crow, and if he makes it personal maybe I can get those troops out of there alive so we’ll have some intact military left, and then we can start with the delays and the soft soap and get some kind of livable armistice, until next time.” Lyons looked at the message.
Dear Ray:
Hunter Wallace is dead, which I assume you know because your people sent the assassin. I’m president now, and I want to open negotiations to end this. I’m hollering uncle, Ray. I’m offering an immediate ceasefire and immediate withdrawal. You did it. You finally beat me, beat us. Savor your victory and let’s stop the dying. I’ll meet with your man Morehouse where and when you say.
—Hugh
Before Lyons could comment, he got a buzz on his phone, which he answered. “The Chief Justice is here,” he told Jenner. The plan was to have the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court administer the oath of office to Jenner on nationwide television.
“Great,” said the soon-to-be president. “I’ll want a few words with him before air time, and we need to get the Cabinet in as well. Lee, we’ll talk about this more later on, but right at the moment we are deep in a hole and it’s time we stopped digging.”
Out in the truck behind the Café Soleil, it was getting as hot as an oven in the hundred-degree July heat. Cardinale turned on the engine and the air conditioning in the cab. “We’re going to need the engine to raise the mortar tubes,” he said. “Might as well cool off a bit while we wait.”
Duke was monitoring CNN on his phone. “Here it comes,” he said. “Holy Christ, look at this!” He showed the small screen to Cardinale, pointing. “It looks like they’ve got the entire Cabinet standing behind him!”
“Show of solidarity with the new leader, that kind of crap,” said Cardinale. “I’ll bet at least half of them think Jenner whacked Hunter Wallace himself, for his own ambition.”
“There’s that bull dyke Chalupiak who wanted to nuke us just as much as those two Jews did, and I think that’s the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court standing to Jenner’s right there!” said Duke.
“Oh, yeah, he’ll be there to swear the new guy in,” said Cardinale. “Taking that fat jackass out will be almost as much of a plus as cacking Jenner and Chalupiak.” Cardinale picked up his phone and sent an encrypted text to Birdie, who had been relocated out of his ancestral home and was now ensconced in a WPB safe house in McLean, Virginia, with his most essential equipment he’d brought with him from the old place. The text read, “Everything set here. Go.” Byrd began tapping out a series of computer commands bounced off a hundred different proxy servers and bogus IP addresses. Taking down the entire District of Columbia ESMA system at once was the most complicated hack he had ever attempted, and it would take a little bit of time.
Jenner sat behind the desk wearing a neat suit with a black mourning armband. He intended to look solemn and dignified; instead, he looked like a combination between Ichabod Crane and a basset hound. The acting president began his speech. “My fellow Americans, I’m afraid that on this anniversary of our country’s birth, an occasion which should be one of pride and celebration for all Americans, I must come to you with sad and shocking news. The first thing that you will notice is that I am not the man who was scheduled to make this address. The man who should be here speaking to you this afternoon is President Hunter Wallace, and he should be delivering to a waiting world the joyful and historic news that our country has once more been reunified, and the demons of racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and hatred have been banished from our land for all time. But this cannot be. This morning, in this very historic Oval Office from which I now speak, Hunter Wallace, a great American and a great president under whom I was proud to serve, was…”
Cardinale’s phone bleeped and he held it up. “Okay, that’s Birdie. Every street cam in the city just went down. Time to rock and roll.” He leaned over and pulled a lever in the cab, a heavy electric motor hummed and whirred, and the flatbed of the truck began to lift up from the chassis, raising the six lengthy iron pipes to a pre-set angle. Cardinale reached under his seat and turned on a timed detonator device. “Okay, we need to un-ass this vehicle now. When those mortars hit forty-eight degrees the firing sequence will start, and then we’ve got about thirty seconds to get out of Dodge, because when they fire the whole truck will be demolished.”
“Good thing nobody’s around,” said Duke as they moved swiftly down the alleyway, which was deserted in the baking heat. “They must all be inside watching the speech on TV.”
“Good,” chuckled Vinnie Skins. “They’ll get a fucking eyeful.”
“How long after the mortars fire before the rounds hit?” asked Duke.
“Maybe twenty seconds, which is a bit of a weak link in the plan, I know,” admitted Cardinale. “Twenty seconds in the air is enough for somebody with some cop-on over there to hear the
blast, figure out what’s going on, and react. Thing is that you’re dealing with physics and gravity, and those can’t be tweaked. They may hear the truck blow and they may even realize what the fuck it is, if they’ve got anybody over there who remembers the old days in Tacoma and Spokane, but once they’re fired they can’t stop those bombs. What goes up must come down. Let’s just hope that out of six shells loaded with SuperSem and white phosphorus, we can ram at least one of them up Hugh Jenner’s ass.”
Secret Service SAIC Lee Lyons was a former FATPO, and he did indeed remember the old days in Tacoma and Spokane. He heard the low boom as the truck went up; so did everyone in the Oval Office, but the explosion sounded far away and as old political troopers the Cabinet and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court maintained their poker faces as they stood around the desk in the Oval Office in a show of solidarity with the new leader of the free world. Lyons spoke into his earphone mike. “McMann! Where was that explosion? It sounded too close for comfort.”
“A couple of blocks to the north, sir,” said McMann. Suddenly Lyons remembered hearing a similar hollow detonation off in the distance, many years before, and what had happened moments later in the Anti-Terrorism Center in Spokane City Hall. He did not hesitate. He charged into the Oval Office just as Acting President Jenner was saying, “We have attempted to contact the fascist régime in the Northwest with a view toward saving human lives, but apparently they are not interested in sparing their own so-called country and their own captive population the horrors of war, for we have not yet received their reply…”
“GET DOWN!” roared Lyons, leaping up onto the desk, grabbing Jenner by the lapels and throwing him down onto the now carpetless floor, covering Jenner’s body with his own.
Then the United States received the fascists’ reply. Television viewers saw a flash of light as one of the mortar shells landed and detonated in the Rose Garden, a brief blur of falling walls and masonry, and then the transmission was cut off.
At midnight that night, it was announced that rescue teams had finally succeeded in pulling Acting President Hugh Jenner out of the rubble, alive and amazingly unharmed except for a broken arm and a broken bone in his right foot. He had lain on his stomach for hours, covered by the dead body of Agent Lee Lyons, feeling Lyons’ blood and fluids oozing all over him. In addition to Lyons, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the entire Cabinet, and numerous White House staff and journalists were dead. The six mortar shells had crashed down into the Rose Garden and onto the roof, largely demolished and set fire to the West Wing, and left the historic residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with almost half the famous frontage in rubble. The walls of the West Wing that remained standing were leaning crazily. If a building could look like it was on the losing end of a bar fight, the White House did.
Hugh Jenner was nothing if not a political showman; the next morning the news channels showed him lying in his hospital bed being sworn in as President of the United States by a mere associate Justice, reassuring the nation that truth, justice, and the American Way would triumph, and closing with an emotional meeting with the widow and small son of the heroic Agent Lee Lyons, the man whose death had saved his life and also removed a possible source of uncomfortable knowledge and questions about whether or not he deliberately introduced Georgia Myers into the Oval Office in the hope or knowledge that she might cack his predecessor. The official government version of Wallace’s death was highly sanitized, of course, but enough of the facts eventually came out so that historians would debate for decades afterward the true course of events and Jenner’s true motives. He never enlightened them and took his secret, if any, to the grave with him.
After the camera crews had packed up and left, Admiral Hector Brava came in. Jenner handed him a piece of paper. “This came in about an hour ago,” he said.
“Ray Ridgeway’s reply?” asked Brava, dreading to read it.
“Maybe. It’s from the Northmen, anyway. This arrived as an e-mail on my personal phone,” said Jenner, his lips compressed. “The one I use only for my family. No official business at all, never, and nobody, I mean nobody knows that those four phones even exist at all. But this came to me. I heard it beep in my pocket while I was lying there in the dark with Lee Lyons lying dead on top of me. The phone in my pocket kept ringing and ringing, all that time, driving me fucking out of my mind until I forgot about the pain and the fear, I just wanted that damned phone to stop ringing. This was the call. I printed it out.”
On the paper was a beautiful color photo of a Northwest Tricolor flag, with Oregon’s famous Mount Hood in the background, under a pristine blue sky. Beneath the flag were three words: Our turn now.
XXI
BLITZKRIEG
(July 5th to August 5th)
Therefore, great king . . .
Enter our gates; dispose of us and ours;
For we no longer are defensible.
—Henry the Fifth, Act III, Scene 3
The following leaflet was air dropped over the American lines at Fairfield, Montana on the evening of July 5th:
WHITE AMERICAN SOLDIERS
It’s like this, guys. You know what happened at Anaconda, you know what happened to your fleet off our coast, you know what happened to the Doughboy, you know what happened to your Cabinet, and you know what’s going to happen to you. By now you all understand that this is only going to end one way. America is done, and so are you.
Or maybe not. Because we Northmen are such nice guys, we’re going to give you a chance to live.
Beginning at 0530 hours tomorrow morning, July 6, white soldiers of the U.S. Combined Military Group Center may leave your positions in safety, on foot only, and return to your side of the border, so long as you are covered by a white flag of truce every 30 or 40 men or so, and so long as you remain on the prescribed route. You get onto our Highway 12, what you call Highway 89 on your old outdated American maps. Then you start walking east, and you don’t stop until you cross the border at Great Falls.
Remember, no vehicles, if you have any functioning ones left. You can go home, but you’re going to walk all the way. You will be escorted at a distance by the men who have defeated you. You may take your personal weapons, which we suggest you turn on the people who sent you here when you get back, and any rations and water supplies you have left, but you don’t take so much as a single green apple or a single drink of water from a roadside spigot from this land you came to destroy. Leave the highway, try to take anything or molest anyone on the way, then the deal’s off and the SS moves in and shoots you down like dogs.
Oh, and you leave all your nigger and Mexican buddies where they are. They’re not going anywhere. Not ever again. When we figure all of you who are of a mind to live have departed, we’re coming in and killing every living thing in Fairfield wearing a dark skin or an American uniform.
Your choice, guys.
(signed)
Zachariah Hatfield
GOC Second Army
Northwest Defense Force
State President Red Morehouse and his SS escort arrived at the Second Army headquarters just outside Fairfield around six a.m. on the morning of July the sixth to see first hand what the response would be to the mercy thus extended to the besieged Americans. General Hatfield led the president with his staff to an observation bunker overlooking Highway 89 that had been installed by the NDF engineers at the beginning of the siege, and together they scanned the highway over half a mile away through field glasses. The NDF artillery, which had been shelling Fairfield continually for days, had fallen silent almost forty minutes before. “We heard a lot of shouting and shooting and some explosive detonations in their trenches, all through the night, over the sound of our own guns,” said Hatfield. “Sounded like grenades going off. We figure some of the niggers and Mexicans didn’t like the idea of being left behind.”
“Still, I wonder how many of the whites actually do love niggers and beaners enough to die for them and with them?” asked Morehouse
wonderingly. “How many of our own will we be killing later on today? How many more white lives snuffed out for no other reason than for the mere physical presence of these dark creatures on our continent, where they never should have come?”
“Far more than there should be, I’m sorry to say,” said Hatfield. “Almost a hundred years of brainwashing and social engineering has done incredible damage to the white psyche, Mr. President. Those guys over on that side of the border can’t think straight any more. Hell, they can barely think at all. We were able to break away from that seventeen years ago in the Northwest, find our courage and our manhood and pick up a rifle to start resisting it. This generation of Americans didn’t, and so mentally and morally, they’re worse off than we ever were in the skulls full of mush department. I know it’s incredible to think that at this late date anybody could actually still believe in liberalism… ah, there they go.”
“Yes, yes!” whispered Morehouse, watching through the binoculars. “At least some of them won’t die for the Jews! Maybe there’s hope they can learn wisdom yet! You’ve got observer teams scanning the whole route, right, to make sure they don’t try to smuggle any niggers or mestizos out disguised as whites?”
“Yes, sir, and there will be several checkpoints along the way where our men will be close enough for visual examination,” said Hatfield. “Aerial reconnaissance reports are coming in reporting a lot of dead bodies down there in their trenches. Looks like they had their own race war last night. They may not have left many blacks and beaners alive for us. At least there are some of them who haven’t had their brains washed.”
In the steamy dawn, Morehouse could see a ragged column of walking men, appearing seemingly out of the churned-up earth down the asphalt of the highway, heading eastward toward the Border Highway and the McCurtain. They wore old Iraq War-pattern desert camouflage uniforms, and they trudged forward with their heads hung down, their arms reversed, furtively glancing to their right and left at the NDF and SS troops watching them from the ridges. A number of them were two-man stretcher teams carrying wounded. Here and there in the long, snaking column of men and a few women were white towels and bits of cut-up bed sheets on long sticks and lengths of pipe. “How many does it look like took us up on our offer of surrender, do you think, Zack?” asked Morehouse.
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