Freedom's Sons
Page 69
NAR civilian casualties—5,112 dead and 7,387 wounded
United States military casualties—541,435 dead and 170,766 wounded
United States civilian casualties—274,707 dead and 733,654 wounded
Aztlan casualties—No accurate figures, International
Red Cross est. 1,000,000.
Canadian Military Casualties—8,654 dead and 6,987 wounded.
Canadian Civilian Casualties—287,782 dead and 130,355 wounded, casualties overwhelmingly non-white.
Decorations (United States)
Congressional Medal of Honor (all services)—57
Army Distinguished Service Cross—118
Navy Cross—12
Air Force Cross—18
Silver Star—212
Decorations (Northwest Defense Force, all services)
Knight’s Cross—30
Iron Cross—2,147 inc. Eli and Thomas Horakova, father and son, and Hamish and Margaret McDowell, husband and wife.
Legion of Honor (Civilian)—290
Decorations (Canada)
Victoria Cross—3
Cross of Valour—7
Decoration for Bravery (RCMP)—10
* * *
On a hot afternoon late in August, an official NAR government sedan pulled up in front of a house in Missoula, Montana. A subaltern opened the car door and a tall and handsome middle-aged man with a beard, dressed in an NDF general’s gray uniform, got out and walked to the front door of the house and rang the bell. Millie Campbell answered the door. She and Jenny Stockdale had just arrived back from Crater Lake along with the children she and her fellow Mama Bears had been teaching and guarding during the war. “G’day, Mrs. Campbell,” said the man, his accent still Australian despite the many years he had spent in the Northwest. “I’m General Charles Randall of the War Prevention Bureau.”
“Yes, I know who you are. I’ve seen you on television,” said Millie, her heart climbing into her throat in fear. “Is it about my husband?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, he’s all right,” Randall assured her. He looked behind her, saw Jenny standing there, and smiled. “Jen! Long time no see!”
“Good to see you again too, Charlie,” said Jenny, genuinely pleased. “I was pretty sure you guys were the ones who abducted my brother. You say he’s all right? Is he back in the country?”
“Yes, and he’ll be here in a bit, but he had something he had to take care of first,” said Randall. “This visit is something we owe you and your family, Mrs. Campbell,” he said, turning to Millie. “I was responsible for your husband’s absence during a very critical time in your lives. It was very important, actually vital, as you’ll hear. I think I owe you an explanation, and since the whole Republic and the world is going to know this story, I think it’s right that you hear it from me and from Robert first. May I come in?”
At that moment Bob was in fact across town, along with Betsy Parris, who had accompanied him on the long and complex trip across the continent and through the battle lines. He had just delivered Allura Myers to her new family. She now sat in her mother’s old playpen, which had been resurrected from the attic. She was playing with a music box, banging it on the floor and trying to sing. Bob had no choice: he told Clancy Myers, Kevin Myers, and Kevin’s wife Tamara of Georgia’s death, baldly and simply, with no details spared and no attempt to whitewash or exculpate his own role in events. “To say I’m sorry doesn’t even begin to cover it,” concluded Bob miserably. “I failed you. I promised I would bring your little girl home.”
“But you did,” said Clancy, looking at the baby Allura in the pen.
When Campbell finally returned to his own home, he was surprised to find General Randall already there, and relieved in the extreme that Randall had told his wife and Jenny Stockdale where he had been and what he had been doing. He wasn’t sure Jason and the Horakovas would believe him; at least now, he had witnesses to back him up. “I just have one question,” said Millie later when they were finally alone.
“Just one?” asked Bob with a chuckle.
She pointed at Richie’s tattoo on his forearm. “Who the hell is Lila?”
* * *
The sky was almost black on the afternoon they buried Georgia Myers on Mount Sentinel. Her grave overlooked the University grounds, and from its foot one could just barely glimpse the roof of the house on Daly Avenue where she had lived as a child, and to which she had so longed to return. This was as close as she would ever get now, but her daughter would live and grow to womanhood there.
Lightning flickered and thunder rumbled distantly in the sky above as the long procession wound up the hill on the road that had been specially cut and graded by the NDF engineers, following the horse-drawn caisson that bore the casket. The mourners were headed by the State President of the Northwest Republic, along with many civil and military dignitaries as well as the family of the dead woman, as well as honor guards from the SS and the Old NVA Association. Bob was there in full Civil Guard dress uniform. Betsy Parris wore a black dress with long sleeves that discreetly covered her tattoos. Georgia’s sister-in-law Tamara Myers carried her little daughter Allura up the hill in her arms. The solemn child clutched her Raggedy Ann doll; she did not cry.
At the site of the open grave with its white marble obelisk, the pipes and drums and band of the Northwest Scots Guards sounded Molendinar. The speeches were few and short; Clancy, Bob, Kevin, Jenny and President Morehouse each said a few words, but there was little to say. The subject was too great a one for words. Morehouse actually said only three sentences. “We have kept our promise to you, comrade. Thank you, from all of us. We will not forget.”
On the coffin were the Northwest Tricolor and the black beret and leather gloves of a Northwest Volunteer. By unanimous vote of the Old NVA Association, Georgia Myers had been awarded posthumous membership in the Northwest Volunteer Army, the only person ever so honored, before or since. The 12-man firing party was provided in equal part by both the ONVAA and the SS. The former Volunteers fired weapons that had actually been used in combat by Northwest Volunteers during the War of Independence, thus establishing a permanent tradition. Before the coffin was lowered into the rocky soil, the Tricolor was removed and folded and handed to Clancy Myers. Allura would receive it when she came of age.
The rain that threatened all day did not come until the evening, after the crowd was gone, and only the Eternal Flame on the white marble slab pierced the darkness. It hissed and sputtered in the rain, but did not go out. The flame and the long forks of Montana lightning in the big sky illuminated the words on the stone:
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
PART THREE
THE GODS OF THE DAWN
Partial excerpt from an article in
The Encyclopedia of Northwest Biography
OGLEVY, Cmdt. Oscar Clinton—Arguably the most famous, or infamous, of the leaders of the NVA Flying Columns during the five-year War of Independence. Acknowledged as a brilliant commander and master of guerrilla tactics, Oglevy and his North Idaho Rangers gained a reputation as deadly effective but also brutal and merciless killers during the war, a legacy which even some NVA veterans find troubling… A little over two years after the Sixteen Days Rebellion in Coeur d’Alene, Oglevy’s unit ambushed a convoy of militarized Idaho state police and their U.S. Special Forces instructors near Elk River, Idaho, in a complex attack, a combination of IEDs, rifle grenades and small arms… By completely destroying an American force of 147 personnel outnumbering his unit by almost three-to-one and sustaining casualties of only three men wounded, Oglevy’s action established the NVA as a true fighting force and not a simple gang of “terrorists.” The incident also produced one of the most iconic images of the war, when the victorious Volunteers laid out a number of dead Americans in front of their burning vehicles and took a famous photograph of Oglevy holding up a broom, signifying a clean sweep… The Elk River ambush is the subject of a popular rebel song.
The Boys of Elk River
We honor in song and in story the names
of the patriot men,
Whose names are immortal in glory, who took back our freedom again.
Forget not the boys of Elk River, who feared not the might of the foe.
The day that they marched into battle, they laid all those steroid thugs low!
So here’s to the boys of Elk River, those Volunteers gallant and true,
They fought for the Northwest Tricolor, and conquered the red, white and blue!
On the 28th day of November, the cops turned down Idaho Eight,
In a convoy of Humvees and deuces, to keep their appointment with fate.
They were all on the way to Elk River, and never expected to stop.
But they met with the boys from the Column, who made a clean sweep of the lot!
So here’s to the boys of Elk River, those Volunteers gallant and true,
They fought for the Northwest Tricolor, and conquered the red, white and blue!
The sun in the west it was sinking. ’Twas the eve of a cold winter’s day,
When the trucks we’d been eagerly waiting, rolled into the spot where we lay.
Then over the hills rang the thunder, of Semtex and fifty White guns,
And the flames from the trucks sent the message that the bold NVA men had won!
So here’s to the boys of Elk River, those Volunteers gallant and true,
They fought for the Northwest Tricolor, and conquered the red, white and blue!
—The Second Generation, Songs of Freedom album
©Bifrost Music, Seattle
XXII
LOST CREEK
(32 years, seven months after Longview)
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
Colonel Robert Campbell, who at the age of 46 was now the head of the Civil Guard’s Montana regional Criminal Investigation Division, shook his salt-and-pepper head in bemused admiration. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I still can’t wrap my mind around it. Where the hell did you come from again?”
“From down in the number four traverse trench,” replied his daughter-in-law, Allura Myers Campbell, a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Montana. She was wearing khaki shorts, a khaki work shirt, mud-caked work boots and knee socks, and a large floppy straw hat to protect her head from the sun, which in May was already becoming uncomfortably hot in the pine hills of Lost Creek. She looked so much like her mother that she sometimes gave Bob a bad moment if she came through a door unexpectedly, as if he were looking at Georgia’s ghost. “It rained this morning, hence the mud up to my knees. We’ve gone eight feet down now, and we’re into the very late Pleistocene era, but the middle strata are definitely from the Neolithic time period we’re interested in, Level One, which is from about eleven thousand years ago. I found another flint point, a big one. It could have been either a knife or a spear point, and it’s in good condition. Took me almost four hours to get it free and tweeze it out. It’s in the lab tent for cleaning, and they’ll send it to UM for carbon-dating, but I’m pretty sure it’s contemporary with the main site, maybe even the mound itself.”
“That’s not what I meant, Ally. I meant what happened to that roly-poly baby who used to go flying around old Clancy’s house on Daly Avenue, chasing Kevin and the cats?” said Bob. “You’re twenty-two years old, now, right? Isn’t it time you stopped growing, girl?”
“I think I have, I just never grew out of making mud pies, as you can see,” said Ally with a smile. “Hi, Uncle Tom,” she greeted the second man beside Campbell. She had grown up with a plethora of “aunts” and “uncles” in the extended Myers-Horakova-Campbell-Stockdale clan. “Don’t tell me we have a spy here in the dig?”
“Not to my knowledge, no,” answered Captain Tom Horakova of the Bureau of State Security, who had driven out to the Lost Creek archaeological dig site with Bob Campbell. Whereas Campbell wore his gray-green Civil Guard uniform, Tom was in civilian clothes; BOSS agents rarely wore their SS black togs completely devoid of insignia, which was their service’s formal attire. Tom was not quite so square and thickset as his brother was and his father had been, having a touch more of Lorna’s Irish blood in his makeup, but the family resemblance was strong nonetheless. “Hopefully you won’t have any out here later on, either, but I’ll be around, just to make sure.”
“Who ever thought ancient history could become so politically sensitive?” commented Allura.
“History is always politically sensitive,” said Bob. “That’s one reason men fight, in order to gain the power to write it.”
“Jeez, I hope we don’t have any bad boys in this group that’s coming to visit,” said Allura. “I’m really looking forward to meeting everybody in the delegation, especially Doctor Haskins from Oxford. He’s considered the world’s greatest living authority on prehistoric man. I made sure I read all his books before I even set foot out here.” The young woman looked over at the gray-green official vehicle the two older men had arrived in. “Is that one of the new flying cars?” she asked curiously. “I hear you guys in the cops are getting them now, even if us lowly civvies can’t have them yet.”
“Give it a couple of years for Cascade Motors to get the bugs worked out and they’ll be on the market, if you can afford one,” replied Bob. “Like everything else new, the first models will probably be pretty spendy, but eventually everyone in the Republic will be able to afford at least some simple, basic model, just like most people were able to afford the Model T when Henry Ford first made it, and most Germans could afford the VW bug when the Führer first ordered it made. But to answer your question, yes, that’s a levitation-capable Heep, one of the first prototypes. It’s Tom’s, actually. BOSS gets first call on all the new stuff, like Wilkerson guns. Us common or garden variety coppers are getting a few next month. We came up here from town, but we haven’t been able to do much flying. Had to drive all the way down here once we left the Missoula city limits. Only the major highways have been re-laid with the magneto strips so far, and very few of the smaller towns like Anaconda. At least not yet.”
“Here comes Uncle Jace,” she said, pointing to a tall man walking down an elevated plank walkway toward them. It was Jason Stockdale, who was still Chancellor of the University of Montana more than three decades after the revolution, and was thereby nominally in charge of the whole dig. “So have you guys ever been out here before?” she asked while they waited for him.
“Nope, first time for both of us,” said Campbell. “Tom and I are going to be running point on the security aspect of this visitation of foreign eggheads. No offense, honey.”
“None taken,” said Allura with a merry laugh. “I am an egghead.”
“Anyway, we figured we needed to familiarize ourselves with the site. Can you give us the grand tour?”
“I think Uncle Jace probably wants to do that himself,” said Allura.
Jason Stockdale walked up to them. The boardwalk was one of a network that had been erected criss-crossing the site, to allow the diggers quick and easy access to various points without causing undue disturbance to the earth. Now in his sixtieth year, Stockdale was a vigorous man who still had a little more auburn than gray in his hair and beard. Today he was wearing jeans made in Pocatello, boots made in Spokane, a jacket manufactured in Seattle, a denim shirt from a family enterprise in Portland, a leather cowboy-style string tie hand-made by his daughter for his birthday many years before, and a traditional Party fedora from Olympia. On his jacket lapel he wore a button, the blue, white and green roundel of the Old NVA Association. He shook hands with Campbell and Horakova, who were in turn wearing the Seven Weeks’ War ribbon over their left front jacket pockets. It was accepted practice in the NAR that three decorations specifically could be worn out of uniform with casual dress. Tom Horakova wore the third of these, the red, black and white Iron Cross ribbon he had won along with his fa
ther Eli, when they had saved a Bluelight unit from capture by an American Special Forces team at one of the forward positions out along the Border Highway. Bob Campbell had been offered the Iron Cross for his role in Operation Belladonna, but had declined it. He hadn’t wanted Ally to grow up seeing him wearing a medal for an operation in which her mother had died.
“Bob, Tom, welcome to Lost Creek,” Jason said. “I have to admit, despite the fact that I have no actual role in the excavation itself and I just handle the paperwork and the money, the work Ally and her classmates are doing up here fascinates me so much that I’ve fallen into the habit of spending as much time up here as I can spare away from the campus.”
“Is Jenny with you?” asked Bob.
“Not today,” replied Stockdale. “She’s back in town ferrying assorted grandchildren around to swimming, the rifle range, and orchestra practice. Oh, Ally, she’s got young Clancy today as well.”
“Yes, I know, Bobby told me he was coming out today and leaving little C with Jenny,” said Allura. “He’s over there digging.” Allura was married to Bob Campbell’s son Bobby Three, and mother to Clancy Campbell, aged four. Bobby Three had followed his father into the Guards, but tended to spend his days off out here in the woods helping his wife dig up dead things. In most extended Northwest families, children ended up being raised and cared for not just by biological parents alone, and certainly not by hired brown nannies, but by a wide range of uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, family friends, and neighbors. It was not the village that Hillary Clinton had in mind when she wrote her idiotic book, but it certainly filled the bill. “Jenny comes out here whenever she can, though,” Jason went on. “She’s always been a Solutrean fan.”
“Bob and Tom said they want the grand tour,” Allura told Jason.
“Sure, that’s my favorite part of every new visit!” said Stockdale. “Follow me on up to the Shack first, then I’ll show you around the site itself.”
The Shack was a large pre-fab building set in a stand of pines, up on a rise about a hundred yards away. A lean 60-foot Tesla tower had been erected behind it to draw electric power for the site, although there were also backup ground generators in another prefab structure farther to the rear, in case the tower malfunctioned or was struck by lightning, as happened on occasion. The Shack contained workrooms, a small kitchen and dining area, two attached bunkhouses for overnighting male and female personnel, shower facilities, a couple of offices, and a series of glass display cases containing some of the more interesting and significant finds made thus far at the site. There were hand tools, needles and other implements made from bone, elk horn, and mammoth ivory, as well as a number of the distinctive flat, thin, leaf-shaped Solutrean-style spear points, arrowheads, and blades. These were the most important harvest of the Lost Creek site thus far, artifacts that had a proven origin in northern Europe, yet which were now being dug out of the ground in Montana.