Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “The ONR guy who talked to us before we left said you’re not a real academic or a scholar, you’re just a thug who shot his way into the Chancellor’s job,” Bella Sutcliffe told him bluntly.

  “And he was absolutely correct,” replied Jason, beaming. “Hence the Al Capone getup.” He thumbed his wide lapels.

  “The characterization doesn’t seem to bother you,” said Bella.

  “To have the Office of Northwest Recovery badmouth one is an honor for any citizen of the Republic,” Jason said.

  Tom Horakova had expected the visitors to avoid him like the plague once they knew he was a BOSS man, but to his bemusement he turned away from loading his own plate at the buffet to find himself surrounded by a bevy of curious females. “Could I trouble you for a light, Captain?” said Bella Sutcliffe, cigarette in her mouth, carefully balancing her plate and a bottle of beer. “You know, I could really get used to this business of being allowed to smoke in public.”

  “I thought they finally gave up on banning tobacco Out There a few years ago,” replied Tom, flicking his Zippo. “That steak sandwich and those salmon cheese things would probably still get you a few months in some blue states and cities, though.” The old dichotomy between red states and blue states had sprung up again in the U.S. in the wake of One Nation Indivisible’s demise. Blue states like New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois still more or less adhered to the government in Washington D.C. and allowed federal agencies to operate. Red ones like Tennessee, Missouri, American Texas and what remained of the African chaos of the South paid only basic lip service to the President and Congress and generously assumed the burden of law-making, law enforcement, and infrastructure from the feds, the fig leaf being that this was in order to cut costs. The fact was that the D.C. government no longer had the muscle to enforce its will on large sections of the North American continent, and it was now pretty much a paper tiger as far as being able to threaten the Northwest Republic went.

  “Oh, yeah, this food is great, I’m going to gain twenty pounds while I’m here,” said Bella with a laugh. “They stopped criminalizing tobacco possession per se because they had to start collecting taxes on something again, so you can buy cigarettes and cigars legally in TPC stores if you pay twelve hundred bucks a year for a license. Now in most places it’s not just any smoking in public that’s banned, but any smoking around a child under twelve, including in your own home of course, any smoking in a communal structure which means all apartment buildings, no smoking in any place of business at all even if it’s not open to the public, so forth and so on,” Bella went on. “It’s a fund-raising thing. What’s left of the federal government can’t collect much in the way of taxes any more, and so they use the TEA as revenuers, kind of like they used to do for pot a century ago. The DHS spies on people not just for political or racial crimes any more, but mostly trying to bust them for various kinds of unauthorized smoking so they can fine the hell out of them, get asset confiscation orders against them and take every fucking penny they’ve got—oh, sorry, sorry, I just made a no-no. You guys are all Goody-Two-Shoes on the language thing, right?”

  “You’re an American, Ms. Sutcliffe,” replied Tom. “Nobody expects you to know how to act.”

  “Ooh, touché, Bel!” exclaimed Amanda Wyrick.

  Letitia Haines pointed to the red, white, and black ribbon over his jacket pocket. “Pardon me, Captain, but is that the Iron Cross?”

  “Yes ma’am, it is,” he told her, sipping on his ginger ale. The NVA’s General Order Number Ten was now a distant memory and a historical curiosity, but he was still on duty.

  “And you won it at age seventeen?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Your army has seventeen-year-old soldiers?” asked Bella Sutcliffe. “Isn’t that against the Hague Convention?”

  “Our existence is against the Hague Convention, Ms. Sutcliffe. But no, most men in the Northwest go into the military officially for the second part of their national service, usually at the age of eighteen or so, although they also get military courses in high school, of course. In case our annoying neighbors ever decide to come calling again. But back then, when we knew you were coming and the national emergency was declared, they called up pretty much everybody who was ambulatory. I served in a support unit along with my troop of Pioneers, which are kind of our version of the Boy Scouts.”

  “You mean the Hitler Youth?” said Amanda Wyrick archly.

  Tom shook his head. “No, ma’am, the Hitler Youth and the Valkyries are private organizations run by National Socialist families for their children, although anybody can join. The Pioneers are the official Party youth organization, and they’re more inclusive, as I believe you would say Out There. Some kids are members of both groups. I was. Anyway, our Pioneer troop was combined with a company of B-Specials, which consisted of men over fifty. They called us Cradle and Grave units. Ours was commanded by my own father, Sergeant Eli Horakova. He and I both got Iron by defending one of the special mobile anti-aircraft units we used at the time and preventing its capture by your lot, along with a number of other comrades, of course.”

  “Is your father still alive?” asked Dr. Wyrick.

  “No, ma’am, he died about ten years ago. Pancreatic cancer. We can cure that now, but it came just a little too late for Dad.”

  “So how does one get to be a secret policeman in the Republic?” asked Bella Sutcliffe teasingly.

  “It’s a secret.” Tom looked up and saw Bob Campbell beckoning him. “Excuse me please, ladies.” He walked over to Bob’s side. “Thanks for the rescue. I know you said no war talk if at all avoidable, but they started it.”

  “I think the Sutcliffe woman was sizing you up. Do I need to call in Marie to chaperone you and protect your virtue?” asked Campbell.

  “Don’t worry, not my type,” said Horakova. Allura Campbell caught their eye and beckoned them from where she sat in one corner with Jason Stockdale and with Dr. Haskins the Oxonian, their plates and beers on a coffee table before them. “Ally wants us to go and meet the big cheese.”

  “We need to meet them all, now or over the next few days, as casually as we can so we can size them all up,” said Bob. They went over and sat down, and both shook hands with Haskins. He turned out to be a pleasant man, and judging from his conversation with no apparent political or racial axes to grind.

  “I have to say, Colonel, that I’m very impressed with the quality and the keenness of your people you’ve got working on this project,” he told them. “Not to mention the high standard of expertise I’m seeing so far in the published work on the Lost Creek excavation site which I’ve read online.”

  “They allow you to view Northwest web sites in the U.K.?” asked Bob. “I thought you had to get all kinds of special permits.”

  “Which I obtained, with some difficulty,” said Haskins ruefully. “I’d say Ms. Campbell is easily as knowledgeable as any doctoral candidate I’ve encountered in my career.”

  “It’s Mrs. Campbell, sir,” said Ally. “We do things the old way here.”

  “Ah yes, the old way,” said Haskins with a nod, raising his beer. “Here’s to the old way. I notice you have the same name as the Colonel here. Any relation?”

  “Bob is my father-in-law. My husband is a Guard. He’s on duty today, but he spends a lot of his spare time helping out at the site, so you’ll meet him as well when we get out there.”

  “I find it surprising you’re married already,” said Haskins. “Of course, I noticed the ring right off. In England one never sees them any more. And so young! Why, you can’t be more than twenty-three years old, my dear.”

  “Twenty-two,” said Ally. “And with a four-year-old son.”

  “Bloody hell! In England wh—English women don’t enter into permanent domestic partnerships until they’re in their late thirties, and very seldom bother to get married at all. Got to get their careers on track, pop that one kiddie, then check it off on life’s to-do list. Sometimes the fathers stay aro
und, but mostly they don’t bother these days, and more and more women use artificial insemination. Order a da from a menu, like a Chinese take-away.”

  “I don’t know how anyone can live like that,” said Ally, shaking her head sadly. “No wonder they’re so unhappy Out There.”

  “You know, Doctor Haskins, you can say ‘white women’ here,” said Bob Campbell with a chuckle. “We won’t lock you up and destroy your career for a casual politically incorrect remark.”

  “No, but my own government would do so in a heartbeat, if they ever found out. Some of my esteemed colleagues here might decide to report me to the Race Relations Board when I get back to Oxford,” said Haskins dolefully. “Colonel, I hope you will understand if we all seem a bit stand-offish on this trip. We don’t mean to be rude, it’s just we’re bloody worried about getting too relaxed and letting something slip. We’re all under a microscope here.”

  “I presume we’ve got an assortment of ONR, CSIS, and MI6 agents in the mix,” said Tom. “Don’t suppose you’d care to really blot your copybook and tell me who they are?”

  Haskins chuckled. “You know, Captain, I might just be tempted to do that out of pure contrariness, if I had any idea of their identity. Unfortunately, I don’t. I could be a spy myself, of course, and so you have to approach anything I say with caution. My assistant Andy Renfrew has a very sharp mind, even if he is a bit of a fussbudget who takes the dour Scot thing a tad too far. If he’s been suborned by MI6, I hope they’re paying him well; Oxford gives unpublished junior fellows the immense prestige of serving in an eight-hundred-year old institution of learning, accompanied by the barest pittance. Kellerman wouldn’t need money. The spooks would turn him by appealing to his vanity, which is vast. Actually, I’m fairly certain Arnie isn’t a spy. Not a discreet kind of chap at all, you see. If he was, he couldn’t resist dropping portentous and mysterious hints, and I’ve not picked up any such. His assistant, Letty Haines, is a brilliant and formidable young woman who wants Arnie’s job and will probably get it sooner or later, and she will be very good at it when she does. She’s quite capable of grassing on him to the Human Rights Tribunal back in the Great White North, or for that matter against me or Andrew to the Race Relations Board or the University authorities back home if we become indiscreet in our cups while we’re here, or if any of us seem too matey with you gentlemen or any of the locals. But I suspect it would be purely out of personal and professional ambition, rather than because she was working for the British or Canadian government. Still, I suppose if there is an MI6 or a CSIS bod here, it has to be one of us four, doesn’t it? Me or Andy or Letty, or just possibly Arnie. The rest of the delegation, the Yanks and the French couple, I don’t know well enough to speculate. Now, Mrs. Campbell, please go over once again this codswallop about how you think you may be able to find contemporary remains of both Cro-Magnon and homo sapiens? I admit I find that hard to swallow.”

  “First, the C-M tumuli remains are from Level One, late Paleolithic, and the bones are carbon dated at between eleven and twelve thousand years,” began Ally.

  “Which is the first thing we’re going to have to check out from top to bottom, because it’s barking mad,” said Haskins. “It is chiseled in stone that the last Cro-Magnon chap turned up his toes twenty thousand years ago, end of bloody story. If those carbon dates pan out, they are the most recent Cro-Magnon remains ever found, and in North America, no less. They’re going to blow all current theories out of the water.”

  “And Kennewick Man was nine thousand years old,” added Ally. “That puts KM and C-M within three, maybe only two thousand years of one another, barely a heartbeat in evolutionary time.”

  “The rest of the world still doesn’t accept Kennewick Man as modern Caucasian,” Haskins reminded her. “Or if we do, we don’t dare say so for fear of ending up in a jail cell, or beaten to death on some sidewalk with hammers and iron bars by leftist student thugs of the kind who police most European universities, hunting heresy.”

  “Do you accept Kennewick Man as Caucasian?” asked Jason.

  “The official U.S. government study group report from 2005 is useless, of course, since the group was chosen on political grounds rather than an objective scientific basis,” responded Haskins. “We are expected to believe that it was pure convenient coincidence that a female Japanese expert just happened to find that Kennewick Man was an Ainu from the northern islands of Japan, which by the by would be almost as anomalous as if he were white. There are samisdat copies of James Chatters’ original report and findings on the Kennewick remains circulating in certain circles throughout Europe and North America, although anyone found in possession of such a forbidden document is brought up on disciplinary charges and may lose tenure. I have seen such a copy and had a chance to study it, and I can find no reason to disagree with Doctor Chatters that the remains were modern Caucasian and not Amerindian, although of course I can’t say so publicly. It’s a pity the remains were lost to posterity. I understand you were not able to recover them after your revolution all those years ago?”

  “No,” said Jason, shaking his head in disgust. “The minute Chelsea Clinton announced the ceasefire, one of the first things the Americans did, in this case the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was to remove the Kennewick bones from the Northwest. They are now officially missing, lost in transit or mislaid or whatever their stupid story is. We suspect they’re hidden in a safe deposit box, or somewhere in the Smithsonian, and if I can catch Doctor Fortis in a chatty mood I might ask him about them. But he may not even know, and if he does it would be more than his job and maybe his life is worth to reveal the location of Kennewick Man. Frankly, I think the Americans probably destroyed the remains out of sheer spite at being run out of the Northwest by the NVA.”

  “Very likely,” agreed Haskins glumly. “Scientists and politicians are two of the most spiteful breeds of mankind. But if what you say about Lost Creek and what you have found there is true—well, I think you see why all of us took the risk of coming. Sometimes the passion, the almost lust for discovery and knowledge can overcome fear. Not always, but sometimes.”

  There was a commotion from down in the airport’s main terminal, audible even in the reception room. Someone was shouting through a bullhorn and there was the sound of many emotional voices. Campbell and Horakova excused themselves and strolled casually out onto the walkway to check it out. They looked down and saw a group of over a hundred people, men and women and children, dressed in a motley of clothes and carrying battered luggage. They were being herded across the floor by several immigration officials and Civil Guards. Many of them were chattering, shouting, laughing hysterically, ranting and raving, some of them weeping. Haskins and Bella Sutcliffe had followed them out and stood with the two cops looking down at the scene. “What on earth?” exclaimed Haskins.

  “Looks like some kind of roundup,” said Bella Sutcliffe with a scowl. “Where are you taking those people? What have they done?”

  “Yeah, does kind of look like one of those old propaganda movies where we’re rounding up the Jews for Auschwitz, doesn’t it?” chuckled Tom Horakova.

  “But in fact it’s rather the reverse, Ms. Sutcliffe. We are taking them to their new homes outside of town,” Campbell told her. “Those, unless I miss my guess, are the passengers of Northwest Air Charter 744 from Vladivostok, although I would guess most of the people are American or Canadian. They are new white immigrants who are Coming Home, almost certainly against the law of their own countries that wouldn’t give them exit visas. For whatever reason, they preferred to travel across three continents to one of the few countries where Northwest Air has landing rights, rather than try to sneak into the Republic through an American or Canadian border checkpoint with forged or deceptive paperwork. It is entirely possible that some of these people literally went around the entire world in order to settle a few hundred miles from their starting point.”

  “Why are those women down there crying, then?” demanded Bella Sutcliff
e suspiciously.

  “Because they have longed to come here for years, and they are free now, free of you and your kind and the filthy rotten world you wallow in!” snapped Horakova. Then he sighed. “Nuts! I’m sorry, Ms. Sutcliffe. That was rude and unprofessional of me.”

  “Hey, you’re a BOSS man,” replied Bella archly. “Nobody expects you to know how to act!”

  XXVI

  THE LITTLE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE

  (32 years, seven months, and nine days after Longview)

  Politically Correct history is a marvelous thing.

  You never know what’s going to happen yesterday.

  —Anonymous American University Professor

  Regardless of whatever other agendas the Eminent Persons Delegation might be following, there was no question about their burning desire to see Lost Creek. They spent one night in the Big Sky Lodge in Missoula, tossed their luggage onto a van at five in the morning for transport to whatever accommodation their hosts might choose to provide for them in Anaconda, then piled into their government loaner cars to follow Dr. Wingard southward in the dawn.

  Wingard called Chancellor Jason Stockdale from his car phone on the drive up and caught him at breakfast. Jason listened to his report and then called Robert Campbell to fill him in. “We were planning on spending the first day here at UM, giving them a full formal presentation, slide show, artifacts, the works,” Jason reported. “Nope, they weren’t having any. They seem to know as much about the site’s background as we do. I think most of them broke the law in their own countries to look over our web material and NAR news reports. I’d have thought they would at least have wanted a tour of the lab, to hear from Doctor Shardlake and his colleagues about how the carbon dating tests were done, nit-pick and challenge the results, so forth and so on. But not a bit of it. They wanted on that site. Ally’s right about one thing. I think it’s going to be hard to keep picks and trowels out of these folks’ hands.”