Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  They got home several minutes later. Alice Tolliver had been phoned by Doris Goodspeed the librarian and given the full dish, and she stood up from the kitchen table and was about to light into Danny full bore, when Elwood held up his hand and shook his head. “Leave her be, Alice,” he said. “It ended tonight. I’ll tell you. Give her some time.”

  Danny took the time to go out in back of the house and stand by the milking barn. For a long time she looked up at the many, many stars that appear overhead in the night sky of Montana. Then she took out the cheap Indonesian phone she’d gotten from the vending machine. She dialed a number that Johnny had made her memorize, for just such an occasion as this.

  A male voice answered. He wasn’t irritated, just curious. “Now, who on earth would be calling me from a burner phone on the American side?”

  “Captain Selkirk?” asked Danny.

  “Speaking.”

  “My name is Danielle Tolliver. I’m kind of a friend of John’s.”

  “I know who you are, miss. What’s happened?”

  Danielle told him what had happened, without crying or hysteria or excuse or evasion. “Thank you, Danielle,” replied Selkirk when she had finished. “This family owes you a great debt.”

  “Will you help Johnny?” she pleaded. “Don’t let them take him away to Billings!”

  “Don’t worry, we’ve got this. How about you? Are you going to be all right? If your grandfather finds out you called me, he is going to be very angry.”

  “I know,” said Danny. “I don’t think he’ll hurt me, but they’re probably going to send me to North Dakota.”

  “Yes, he’s very good at sending people away from the Northwest,” said Selkirk tightly. “Danny, I have to go, but I’d like to tell you something first. A long time ago, the people in this part of Montana had to make the very same choice you’ve made tonight. I think you’ve made the right one, but if it helps, it wasn’t any easier back then.”

  “I know,” said Danny.

  XXXVI

  FORTUNE FAVORS THE BRAVE

  (40 Years, 10 months and 19 days after Longview)

  Fortes fortuna juvat.

  —Latin proverb

  One of the Civil Guard’s informants Over the Road was Mike Sweeney’s cousin, who was ideally placed because she worked as the night dispatcher in the sheriff’s office, so Lieutenant Bobby Campbell knew about what had happened with Johnny Selkirk by 8:30 p.m. that night. He was back at the Guard station in Basin by nine, having called his entire complement back on duty, consisting of eight men and one female officer. They all gathered in the station’s small operations center, where he ordered Sergeant Boardman to start distributing field gear and weapons. “Can your cousin let us know when they leave to take Selkirk to Billings?” he asked Sweeney.

  “They’re not driving, apparently,” replied Sweeney. “Roxy said the FBI agents have called for a helicopter from Billings to transport him to the detention center there. The feds have a special wing in the jail for their prisoners.”

  “Can she give us any ETA on the chopper?”

  The corporal shrugged. “Maybe, but Ben Lomax suspects she’s on our pad—hell, he knows it. He doesn’t fire her because he’s known Roxy since she was a baby, she’s a good dispatcher, Jefferson County doesn’t pay chicken feed to its employees, and he knows she needs the extra money. Besides, he figures if he canned her, we’d just recruit somebody else in his office he doesn’t know about.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Bobby.

  “Ben told her so,” replied Sweeney. “But he also told her that if something big happened that might mean real trouble, she was to keep quiet to us about it, or she’d lose her job. I think Roxy gave me that one call because she likes Johnny, and she’s his cousin too, a third cousin I think. Don’t know if she likes him enough to lose her job and pension over him, though. She may give me another call tonight; on the other hand she may not.”

  “Nuts!” said Bobby. “How long do you think it will take for those people in Billings to scramble a chopper and make it to Boulder?”

  “They may already be in the air, sir.”

  Bobby scowled. “All right, we’ve got to get over there, extract John, and get him back on our side of the Road before that copter gets into the air on the return trip. Once he gets out of the county and they get him into a cell in Billings, this is no longer a local hiccup, it’s a full-fledged incident of the kind that could snowball into something really serious. The Republic has a policy: we are not subject to the laws of the United States. Americans don’t arrest us or put us in their prisons with mud people. They did enough of that evil mess before the War of Independence. We haven’t always been able to enforce that down through the years when NAR citizens have gotten into trouble, but this is close enough where we can do something about it, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the stinking FBI, who shouldn’t even be over there, take a Northwest citizen from my patch away into the interior somewhere and bury him with niggers. Even if he did get himself caught like an idiot, because he was thinking with his third leg instead of his brain. I haven’t actually been over into Boulder for obvious reasons, but I assume some of you guys have spent some time over there. Is there any place near the jail where they could land a helicopter, a helipad on the roof or something like that?”

  “No, sir,” replied Boardman. “They’ll have to land at the airport and those feebs will have to drive him down there.”

  “How far is the airport from the sheriff’s office?” asked Bobby.

  “About a mile and a half.”

  “Show me on the map,” commanded Bobby. He followed Boardman’s finger on the wall.

  “The sheriff’s office is on South Washington Street, and the jail is in the back,” said the sergeant. “It’s not very big, maybe seven or eight cells. If they go straight to the airport they’ll take 69 South, this way, turn right on Little Boulder Road, left on North Whitetail Road, and then there they are.”

  “We’ll have to intercept them once they get off 69,” said Bobby. “Any place we can set up an ambush along there?”

  “I’d say our best bet would be either when they turn onto Little Boulder Road off the main highway, or turn off Little Boulder onto Whitetail,” said Sweeney, pointing. “They’ll have to slow down a bit when they turn. We figuring on only one car?”

  “Depends on whether or not Lomax is helping the FBI and gives them an escort,” said Bobby. “If it’s just those two droids and their toy soldier, that’s one thing. If there’s local deputies and the sheriff himself present, that’s going to ratchet things up. Our intel says Lomax has twelve full-time deputies and about twenty part-timers. We’ve got nine men. Sorry, Tasha, I have to leave somebody here to answer the phone.”

  “I did my national service in the Amazons, sir,” said Guardswoman Tasha Briggs in a sour voice.

  “Yes, ma’am, I know, but you’re also the mother of two boys and a girl, and I’m not risking their mother getting killed or captured in an international incident. Sorry, Tash, old-fashioned chivalry wins out tonight. Corporal Sweeney, you seem to know the most about the ins and outs of things in American Jefferson. How much help do you think Lomax will give the feebs, knowing as he does the bad blood it’s going to cause between his side of the Road and ours?”

  “Honest to God, sir, I just don’t know,” Sweeney told them. “Yeah, Ben has always tried to keep everything damped down and mellow, and he’s bent a lot of his own kind’s rules to do it, but he has to balance that with staying on the right side of Governor Wellman and that scurvy crew in Billings, plus he has to get re-elected every four years. He has his own red lines, and he doesn’t like the Selkirks. John does have a tendency to show his butt a bit when he’s cruising through their side on the way back from a run. Ben doesn’t want a war with the Republic on his turf, but he won’t back down beyond a certain point. What that point is, I don’t know. We may find out tonight.”

  “It would sure help if we had m
ore intel,” said Bobby. “I know what you said about your cousin, but we’re going in almost blind. I’ll lay out a plan, but while I’m doing it you need to go up to my office and make some calls to some of our other ears Over There and see if they can be of any help.”

  “Got it, boss.”

  Bobby turned back to the map. “This is going to be tricky. We’re trying to intercept at least one vehicle, but maybe more, facing we don’t know how many armed opponents, along a route we’re not sure of and where we’re going to have to deploy in the dark on unfamiliar terrain, plus we don’t even have any real timeframe to work with. The only thing we know right now is that our hostage is now in a holding cell in the sheriff’s office, or maybe back in the jail section itself. Add to that an almost overriding political consideration demanding that we keep local Jefferson County casualties to a bare minimum, or better yet to zero. I’d really like to hit that jail directly, as fast as possible, within the next hour, since that’s the only place we can be sure of Johnny’s location, but there’s no way in hell we can storm a defensive position like that when we don’t even know the layout, against an unknown number of hostiles, when we’ve got only nine men.”

  “Thirty-six,” said a voice in the doorway. Bobby looked up and saw former NVA Captain Ray Selkirk standing in the doorway. He was wearing a set of obsolete old-pattern NDF tiger-stripe camos from the War of Independence, topped with a battered and stained slouch hat that looked like it had been trampled by buffalos. His armament was a bit antiquated as well, with a Browning 10-millimeter automatic on his hip and a U.S. Marine KA-BAR knife on his web belt, while slung over his shoulder was an older-model X-3 rifle, probably from the Seven Weeks War. Virtually every household in the Republic had one or two of those lying around since they had been superceded by the X-4, and the NDF had plumped their budget by selling off the Threes as surplus. “You got thirty-six men now. Well, thirty-three men and three women, to be accurate,” Selkirk announced. “That’s if you want to throw in with us. Otherwise, me and the family’s going over there to get John on our own.”

  Bobby walked down the short hall and opened the door. Under the lights outside he saw a long caravan of trucks and cars filling the street, some levitational and some ordinary ground vehicles, and a large party of people standing along the sidewalk. They were dressed in various bits and pieces of NDF surplus, jeans and work clothes, mostly broad-brimmed headgear, and in one case a young man in a track suit. All of them were packing heavy, mostly their NDF reservists’ military weapons, although there were one or two Winchesters and civilian model hunting rifles with telescopic sights. Three men in the back of the pickup truck had a bipod-mounted splat gun resting on the roof of the cab. “What kind of ammo have you got for the splat gun?” asked Bobby.

  “Anti-personnel, HE, and both red and white phosphorus incendiaries,” Selkirk told him. “A case of each, which is SOP reserve requirement. That’s my second oldest son Ned, his boy Faron and Faron’s friend, Sam Cowley. They crew the weapon in their reserve unit, Fourth Battalion, 84th Regiment, so they know what they’re doing. We’ve also got a couple of my nephews down there who are crackerjack rifle grenadiers, and they brought their chunkers.”

  “You planning on getting John out of jail or slaughtering half of Boulder?” asked Bobby.

  “Whatever it takes,” said Selkirk.

  “They’re sending a copter to take him to Billings,” said Bobby.

  “I figured. That’s why we don’t have time to turn this into a long debate about law and jurisdiction and who’s job it is to do what,” said Selkirk. “We’re going over, with you or without you. Might actually be better if we went without. Look, son, I know this could blow up in our faces. I don’t think it could cause another war, because they don’t have anything to fight with anymore, and they’ve got so many troubles of their own they can’t afford to sweat a little thing like this. But it’s not a little thing to us. If they get that young fool of a grandson of mine out of here to Billings, then we’re going to have to go after him in Billings, and that’s going to start all kinds of bad balls rolling for this part of the world. If they get him out of Billings and into some prison factory where we can’t get to him at all, or more likely if he dies in custody, then that’s going to re-open all the old wounds. Anybody on their side of the Road who assisted is going to be in our bad books, and I can’t guarantee that all the tit-for-tat shit won’t start up again along the border here. We’ve all had enough of that, and things have been quiet for a long time, but then that she-boon and her American gun thugs had to come in here and start swaggering around like they were somebody and they meant something, shoving people around like none of the past forty years ever happened. Now they’ve taken a member of my family. That ain’t gonna happen. But we’re just ordinary folks. You and your boys are Northwest cops, and if you come Over The Road with us tonight, the government of the Republic will be implicated, and that will take this mess to a lot higher level.”

  “I know it,” said Bobby. “The trouble is that as representatives of the NAR we are involved, because one of our own has been seized and subjected to the authority of the United States of America again, and that is something we will not tolerate. I know you’re the last man I should be lecturing on the whys and wherefores of the revolution, sir, but we were taught in our History and Moral Philosophy classes in school, in the army, and then again in the Civil Guard training course, that the reason this country exists is not only to provide a Homeland for all the world’s Aryan peoples, but insofar as we can to provide protection for whites against those who want us to disappear from the face of the earth. That was the whole crux of that incident with Admiral Leach and the Spokane down in New Zealand a while back, remember?”

  “You’re talking about the Morehouse Doctrine,” commented Selkirk.

  “Yes, exactly,” agreed Bobby, “A white man is in danger from the weltfeind, I have the resources to at least attempt to do something about it, and I can’t sit idly by. But sir, with all due respect, if we go together then it’s my party and I’m in charge, precisely because I do have official rank and standing. This needs to be done as an official act of the Republic, to show the world the price of assault and insult, not some act of old-style vigilantism. That being said, I’d appreciate your experience and expert advice. We’ll just call you a consultant.”

  “Fair enough,” replied Selkirk with a chuckle. “I agree, this should be an official act. Personally, I think when we went Over There twenty-eight years ago, we should have stayed, and gone on to Billings and Bozeman and run their asses out of there too, and kept it all. No offense, son, but do you intend to call your dad and that uncle of yours with the trenchcoat and let them know what’s going on?”

  “No,” said Bobby, who had been kicking around the idea but decided against it. “I’m just a Guard lieutenant, but my father is the commander of the entire Border District, and my uncle is a senior state security officer. If this goes south they may need some plausible deniability. I know all your relatives there will be reservists, but anybody special who could make themselves useful?”

  “They’re not just relatives. We do have a few friends, you know,” said Selkirk. He pointed to an old man of almost his own age. “Dave Evans was with me in the Regulators. He’s not quite spry enough for the field these days, arthritis, and his eyes ain’t what they used to be, but he can do anything else that needs doing. Everybody over about the age of forty-five was in the Seven Weeks.”

  “Reserve officers and specialists?”

  “Myself, of course, then there’s Dave, and my son Ray Junior, who’s also Johnny’s father. My third son Joe Lee is a warrant officer in the engineers, so he knows how to blow stuff up real good. Finally, over there’s my great-nephew Cullen who’s a color sergeant in the SS. He happened to be home on leave tonight at the house when the call came in.”

  “Bring them in with us,” said Bobby. “We need to get a move on.”

  When they got inside, Bob
by addressed the group. “Right, guys, looks like we’re going to have a little more manpower than we thought at first. We now have enough personnel to attempt an extraction from the Jefferson County sheriff’s facility with some hope of success, but we are still desperately short of intel as to who’s doing what over there. I have Corporal Sweeney upstairs trying to locate somebody who is willing to go into town and keep an eye on things for us, either for payment or to try and avert bloodshed on our part of the Border tonight and in the future, but I don’t think he’s had any luck so far. By the way, how did you find out about your grandson’s capture, Captain Selkirk?”

  “Danielle Tolliver called me. She was there when it happened.”

  “Ah. Do you think she would be willing to help us further, by giving us intel from on the ground?”

  “Farm and ranch families go to bed early,” said Selkirk. “She said she’d wait until everybody was in bed, then see if she could lift the keys to one of their trucks and come into town. If that old bastard Elwood Tolliver hears her leave he’ll figure out what she’s up to and he’ll come after her, so he’ll probably be running around over there as well.”

  “All right, we need to get on with this,” said Bobby. He diddled one of the operations room’s computers and a large blueprint appeared on the wall. “This is the schematic we have for the Jefferson County sheriff’s office. We need to know whether John Selkirk is being held in the actual jail itself, or in one of two holding cells in the processing area, what they used to call the bullpen, I believe, because that will affect our entry. If he’s in the bullpen it’s quickest to just bust through the front door and walk right in. If he’s in the detention section itself then there is a short corridor with heavy steel security doors at both ends. If one of them shuts those doors on us, then we’re not getting through without blasting, and maybe killing or injuring anyone who’s in the jail wing, including young Selkirk.”