Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “That’s okay, Grandpa. But are you saying you think the white race really should have died out back then?” asked Danny, puzzled.

  Elwood answered slowly. “Danny, have you ever seen any horror movies about the Donner Party, or that soccer team crashed in the Andes long ago, or people in a lifeboat out at sea, when the choice has to be made either to become a cannibal and eat one’s fellow sufferers, or to die oneself? It’s a horrible moral dilemma for a person, but it is the one the entire white race of people faced back in the early part of this century. How far does sheer survival justify a person, or a group of people, committing terrible acts that are not only a crime but a sin? This is where the abyss opens up between people like me and Ray Selkirk, the head of the family that you are at least partly considering joining, The abyss between everything we have tried to teach you to be, and the terrible nation of hate-filled killers you are considering becoming part of. Ray Selkirk wanted his children, if any, to look like him, and for that reason he chose to shoot twenty-six helpless people through the head. That decision is not morally admissible, for any reason. It can’t be allowed.”

  “Then what is the right choice if you’re stuck in a lifeboat and there’s no more food?” asked Danny. “Let the others eat you?”

  “Yes,” said Elwood quietly. “If you truly wish to prove for all time that you are morally superior, you voluntarily surrender your own life rather than take that of someone else. There aren’t very many white people left in the United States, Danny, and at some point all those colored people will probably break out of the cities and overrun the countryside and devour us, maybe quite literally. But I at least shall not die a monster. Ray Selkirk will.”

  XXXII

  WAR BY OTHER MEANS

  (40 Years, ten months and two days after Longview)

  Politics is war by other means.

  —Newt Gingrich

  One of a Civil Guard station commander’s perks was subsidized accommodation for himself and his family. Housing in the Guard barracks was available for single troopers, but it was assumed that anyone who had risen to the rank of lieutenant would be married with children. If he wasn’t, he’d better have a good explanation, such as being scarred for life in the face by acid. Although public discussion of homosexuality had disappeared from the NAR, to the point where many adults didn’t even know what it was, one of the internal immune systems that had been carefully distilled into the Northwest’s mores and mindset by the Ministry of Culture was a sub rosa but significant social stigma against anyone who remained unmarried and without children. In the NAR, marriage was considered the normal condition of life for adult people. It wasn’t legally mandated, but the social pressures were immense. They were seldom needed, since of course marriage was the normal condition of life in Aryan societies. One of the things the MoC had discovered early on was that it was actually very easy to gently, imperceptibly steer white people back into the way that their racial instincts told them things ought to be.

  For the duration of their tour of duty in Basin district, Bobby and Allura Campbell lived in a spacious hundred-year-old, bungalow-style brick house on a back road about a mile from the station. It had a large fenced yard with discreet electric rattlesnake, cougar, and thylacine barriers for their three children to play in, although a grizzly bear or a Sasquatch might present a problem, should one ever wander out of the mountains. There was a triple carpad at the side of the house for levitational vehicles, and a satellite uplink on the roof with full encryption capability for Bobby’s office, so he could work from home when required.

  Their son Clancy was twelve now, a tall and athletic boy. These days, until school started again in a couple of weeks, he spent most of his time herding his two beloved younger sisters around like a sheep dog. Catherine Campbell was seven years old and insatiably curious about everything; she knew in no uncertain terms that she was to stay away from the family guns, but beyond that she had to be watched to make sure she didn’t take needed household appliances apart to see what was inside. Morag was three, and spent most of her day attempting to break the speed of sound around the house and the yard. “God, I’ll be glad when she can start kindergarten!” said Allura that night when Bobby Three came in. “Clancy took her out and let her just run up and down the road with the dog this afternoon, and it didn’t slow her down one bit. She’s still out there tearing up and down and wrestling with Dave.” Through some arcane process Bobby Three didn’t understand, the elder girl Cathy had acquired the right to name the family’s latest herd of animals when they had arrived in Basin, and she had been in an onomatopoeic mood. Now they now had Dave the dog, Carl the cat, Bill the bird, and Thomas the turtle, as well as Frank, Fred, Phyllis, and Felix the fish. Morag was in the back yard playing tug of war with Dave, a black Labrador, using an old towel, and the two of them were whirling over the landscape like dervishes. Bobby stuck his head out of the window and yelled, “Clancy! Keep them away from the picnic table and the barbecue grill and make sure they don’t knock anything over! I’m coming out and lighting up as soon as your grandfather and Uncle Tom and your cousins get here!”

  “When the full zoo arrives we’ll have to chase them out into the front yard or we won’t be able to cook,” said Allura.

  There was a beeping noise which told Allura and Bobby that a vehicle was descending onto their carpad outside. He glanced at the screen and saw that it was in fact two vehicles. Ally leaned out the window. “Clancy!” she called out. “Make sure the girls and the dog are away from the pad!” The carpad had a fail-safe mechanism that would shut down and halt the descent automatically when someone stepped onto the metal tarmac, which was rather like a gigantic circuit board, and there were safety features on the cars themselves that would prevent them landing on human beings, but family policy required a quick roll-call any time the landing alarm sounded. All were duly present and accounted for.

  Bobby Three and Allura walked out and greeted his father and his mother, who were getting out of one large flying SUV, as well as his BOSS uncle Major Thomas Horakova and Tom’s wife Marie with their brood of young maniacs, all up from Missoula for the weekend. Colonel Robert Campbell Junior’s hair and beard were turning gray, and his erect body starting to fill out. He wore the wear and tear of years well, but it was there. At 53, Milada Campbell was now the image of an old-country grandmother. She embraced her son. “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Nick and Ida couldn’t make it?” His sister and her Russian-born scientist husband lived in the national spaceport town of Centralia, Washington, along with their own three children.

  “No, Nick had to work,” Millie told him. “Some rocket going up that couldn’t leave the earth’s atmosphere without him.” Millie went to hug Allura.

  “Hey, Dad. Hey, Uncle Tom,” said Bobby Three, shaking hands with both men. “Thought we’d do some buffalo burgers and boerwors tonight.” Northwest cookouts were much like the traditional American version, but the beer and the meat were cheaper and sometimes a bit more exotic, like the South African farmers’ sausage that had become popular in the Republic.

  “Sounds good,” said his father, who had become Big Bob over the years in order to distinguish him from his son. “Better than Old Bob,” had been his verdict. The four Horakova kids ran into the back yard to play with their Campbell cousins. Allura and Millie and Marie followed them around the side of the house. “Come on back when you’re ready to start cooking and we’ll move the thundering herd out here so we can hear ourselves talk,” called Allura.

  “Bobby, I appreciate the invitation, but the fact is Tom and I would have been up here to see you about now anyway,” his father told him. “Tom needs to brief you on a few things. This comes from Olympia, PB level. There’s something going on Over The Road, and it’s not too savory. We may be hanging around for a while. Tom might be, anyway. This is something we need to keep an eye on.”

  “Mmm, the Political Bureau and a senior Guardsman and a State Security officer usually aren’t a very good combin
ation,” replied Bobby Three with a frown. “Every time I see you two guys together on an official basis it reminds me of that wretched Lost Creek business. This gonna get that hairy?”

  “Not immediately,” said Tom. “At least I don’t think so. We would have come down to your office, but we have to assume that the Billings government and maybe others have eyes and ears in Basin, and we’d rather nobody Over The Road finds out that BOSS is interested just yet. We’ll let ’em think they’ve still got us fooled. Let’s keep it informal for now. After supper Marie and the kids will go on over to the guest house, and we can have a few quiet words.”

  Later that night the three men sat out on the porch. Marie and the Horakova children had taken one of the levitators to the guest house where they would be staying for the weekend, since the Campbells’ current place wasn’t really large enough to accommodate so many people overnight even when couches and sleeping bags were pressed into service. Ally and Millie were inside putting the girls to bed, while Clancy was out back using an incinerator barrel to burn all the flammable detritus from the supper, plus anything else he could find to fuel the flames and satisfy youth’s natural urge to destroy, although Bobby made sure he had a fire extinguisher handy. “Keep an eye on the sparks. Starting a forest fire is not the best way to impress our new community here,” he had sternly warned his son. The three of them leaned back, finishing off large glasses of draft Red Hook beer in Big Bob and Tom’s case, and iced tea in Bobby’s. “So what’s up?”

  “Our neighbors across the way over there in Boulder are going to be getting a visit soon,” said Tom. “A dusky African maiden bearing gifts, all the way from the New England Union, no less, and it looks like she will have a few security consultants in her entourage she shouldn’t have. One is an officer from the New Model Army. The other two appear to be undercover FBI agents.”

  “What?” exclaimed Bobby. “You’re kidding! NMA and feebs on the border? That’s in violation of the Armistice!”

  “An Armistice from twenty-eight years ago that never metamorphosed into an actual peace treaty, and whose provisions in some areas were always rather murky,” said Colonel Campbell. “The same old problem. Negotiating a formal and binding treaty requires that both parties acknowledge the other exists. The United States still insists that we are a blank spot on the map that suddenly fell off the face of the earth forty years ago. It’s a gray area. Technically speaking, the FBI is a criminal organization from our point of view, and they are not allowed in the demilitarized zone, but they do slip in and out on occasion for various nefarious purposes, and as long as they don’t make a habit of it and they don’t stick around, we usually don’t make an issue of it.”

  “Who the hell is this negress and why the hell is she bringing feebs to Boulder, Montana?” asked Bobby Three.

  “Here’s where it gets complicated,” Tom told him. “Bear in mind that we don’t know everything ourselves, and some of this is educated guesswork. The negress in question is named Gabrielle Martine. She’s one of the carefully trained and educated ones from their small black élite they still present for token diversity, to maintain the pretense that those things are equal to people in some way. She’s an assistant director with the United States Economic Recovery Administration out of Burlington, Vermont, which as you know is now the effective capital of the U.S.A. Washington, D.C., is now a mostly symbolic, fortified enclave that has to be supplied by air because the roads are all out and the overland route is too dangerous due to marauding Third Worlders and general bandits. The ERA is planning on building what they call a CPZ, a Community Prosperity Zone over there in American Jefferson County.”

  “A what?” asked Bobby.

  “A kind of big industrial park with all kinds of mostly hi-tech and big-ticket industry,” said Horakova. “Scientific research labs, factories for pharmaceuticals and top-end electrical components, chemical processing plants, food processing plants, a plastics factory, a major internet server hub. Also a couple of meat-packing plants for those parts of the United States where meat is legal now, and for the local farmers and ranchers there will be agricultural stations, fertilizer and agricultural implement factories, everything they need to revive farming and livestock in American Montana into a profitable and productive industry. This will bring a lot of new people into the area, skilled technical and scientific and administrative types, who will be getting paid big New American bucks. They’ll require housing, goods, and services, and so there are also plans on the drawing board for a couple of upscale malls with Mighty Marts, fancy fern bar restaurants, boutiques… the usual latté town appurtenances. Plus these newcomers will need nice new McMansions to live in, so there will be a construction boom of the kind the American side hasn’t seen for a long time, which will in turn generate more money and new residents, so forth and so on.”

  “Uh, okay, I guess that’s great news for the folks Across The Road, but why Jefferson County, of all places?” asked Bobby.

  “Therein lies the question,” Tom said soberly.

  “Somebody in Burlington wants to play chicken with the Republic? They just decided they want to come up to the Border Highway and thumb their nose at us? Why?” inquired Bobby.

  “It may seem that way at first glance, but in their madness is method. The intelligence eggheads and analysts and gamers at the Circus and CMI have come up with a possible theory, and right now the PB thinks it’s the most likely scenario. The theory is that the Americans and the East Canadians, who also seem to be involved, are gearing up for a Cold War. You remember that term from your history classes about the 20th Century?”

  “Yeah,” replied Bobby. “I didn’t think the United States was in any position to wage any kind of war against us, cold or hot.”

  “To their everlasting chagrin, no, they are not,” replied Big Bob with a smile. “We are the regional superpower. The only other nations on earth with a military considered strong enough to take on the NDF are China and Russia. We’ve a long-standing and mutually beneficial entente with Moscow, and the Chinks steer clear of us. They got burned during the Seven Weeks when they backed the beaners down south and they lost a lot of pilots and copters and treasure. They won’t throw good men and money after bad unless they have a serious reason, which so far hasn’t been the case. They have all the rest of the world to play with. That may be changing, though we haven’t detected any wily Oriental gentlemen involved in ERA activity yet. Rather the reverse. The Chinese don’t want the United States or Europe to recover economically.”

  “I thought America pretty much fell to pieces after the Seven Weeks,” said Bobby Three. “Hell, from what a couple of blockade runners who just came back from Minneapolis a few days ago told me, it’s all they can do to keep their own cities from bursting open like a leper’s boil and washing like a poison tide over the whole countryside.”

  “That’s been the situation for quite some time, yes, but the American government is trying to change that, or at least figure out a way to deal with it when it happens,” replied Tom seriously. “This is going to take some explaining.

  “You know that after the loss of the Seven Weeks War and the death of Hunter Wallace, the United States and to a lesser extent East Canada pretty much imploded as powerful central governments? Imperial America was always based on force, ever since Abraham Lincoln called up one hundred thousand soldiers to kill and coerce other Americans. Then after we kicked America’s ass, the D.C. régime lacked the police and military muscle to enforce their will on what part of the continent remained to them. Effective power devolved back to the state and local levels. Large parts of the United States reverted almost to a situation of the kind that existed prior to 1861, where state and local government ran everything for the benefit of their own communities, which was what the Founding Fathers originally intended back in 1789.”

  “Yeah,” said Bobby with a nod. “Basically, in scattered parts of the country where white people were still the majority and still more or less in charge, t
hey were able to establish enclaves where the electricity still worked, the cops and fire department got paid, the roads got repaired, the hospitals still functioned, and there was still food on the grocery store shelves, at least local produce. The big energy conglomerates had mostly moved offshore by then to escape ONI’s confiscatory taxation and nationalization, but they were still able to supply enough petroleum-based fuel to keep essential industries and transport rolling.”