Freedom's Sons
Page 111
“I wasn’t actually on the bridge crossing that morning, because of General Wingfield’s no-girls-allowed order,” explained Jenny modestly. “I was back at headquarters monitoring computers.”
“Screw the stupid order,” said the thin woman in the wheelchair. “I was here anyway. I was here before you guys.”
“Oh? Where?” asked Jason skeptically.
“Right up over your heads,” she said, pointing upward at the iron arches. “I was sitting up there spotting for the artillery and listening to indecent proposals from some Okie Luftwaffe pilot.”
“You’re Nightshade?” gasped Jenny in astonishment. “We actually spoke on the radio when you got up on top there and started calling the shots. I remember you back-talked General Wingfield.”
“Why am I not surprised at this?” said Cody.
“It is an honor to meet a national heroine, comrade,” said Jason with a serious bow. “I’ve heard about your exploits during both wars.”
“No, you watched that stupid movie where Kelly Shipman played me as a blonde bimbo, and you’ve probably seen that telephoto lens shot of Cody and me making out behind the vending machines at the Longview conference,” said Emily in irritation.
“Ignore her,” said Cody. “She’s just crabby because she broke her hip in the bathtub a week ago, and me having to push her across. She wanted to climb up on the girders again.”
Up ahead the SS band struck up the Panzerlied, serenading the small group of Germans who had just crossed the line on the Oregon side of the bridge, where the American barricades had been set up, and where they had swarmed over the Bremer walls and left bodies of dead comrades lying on the asphalt for a hundred yards until the last of the Portland gang-bangers were dead or had turned tail and run. The marchers walked slowly along after them, mostly in silence now, as memories swelled of men who had begun the long march with them and were gone now. Not just the march across the bridge, but the march that had begun five years before that, when America’s carrion crows had come for white children in Coeur d’Alene and been shot to pieces by ordinary people who suddenly, through some miracle, remembered that they came from the greatest warrior race in all of history. Ordinary people who at long last, at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute and the last second, had finally had enough.
A few minutes later Jason and Jenny Stockdale, Shane and China Ryan, and Cody and Emily Brock crossed the old barricade line together, with the roar of the cheering crowd in the bleachers and along the river bank below roaring like Niagara Falls in their ears.
“Well, we made it,” said Jason.
“Yeah, we made it,” said Shane.
“We did,” said Cody. They all understood what they meant.
* * *
“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”—Matthew 5:14
The State President of the Northwest American Republic sat in his oak-paneled private office in his official residence in Olympia. He was a fit but elderly man with a white moustache, wearing a neat charcoal gray suit that was patterned after one President Calvin Coolidge had worn at his inauguration, with his pinned decorations over his left pocket and his Iron Cross and Knight’s Cross around his neck. He was studying a report in a folder on the desk before him.
He looked up and saw a small golden head looking at him with solemn green eyes over the edge of the desk in front of him. It was one of his great-grandchildren. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” said the little girl.
“Which one are you? There are so many of you that I forget.”
“I’m Annie. I’m going to be four.”
“Oh, yes. Your father’s my grandson Michael.”
“Daddy’s on the moon,” said the little girl.
“Yes, that’s why you and your mother are staying here at Longview House for a while.”
“Whatcha doing?” asked Annie.
“I am reading a report on steel production in our country,” he told her.
“Why?”
“Because I’m the president, and I have to do presidential things, which includes reading a lot of long, boring documents.”
“What’s them?” she asked, pointing at his decorations.
“Those are medals. I got them in the war. Several wars, actually. I am wearing them all today because in a little while I am flying down to Portland to make a speech.”
“Where did you get them?” she asked.
“The state and the army gave them to me because they thought I was very brave, although in fact I just acted like a damned fool where others could see me.”
“Why were you brave?” asked the little girl.
“Because someone had to be.”
“Why?” she asked.
“So that you could be here today, asking me questions. How did you get in here, anyway?” he asked. “There’s supposed to be an SS man on duty outside the reception room. You didn’t take him out, did you?”
“I snucked in.”
“So I see.”
“Why are you making a speech?” asked Annie.
“Because that’s one of the presidential things I have to do all the time, so they will let me live in this nice big house,” the old man told her. “Sometimes when I make speeches people want me to clatter around with all this junk on my chest. Normally I don’t wear these, except for this one.” He pointed his thumb at the piped blue, white and green Old NVA roundel on his lapel. He wore it even though he was also wearing the actual decoration itself, which was technically incorrect, but he didn’t care.
“Why?” asked Annie.
“Because that is the one I am most truly proud of,” said the president. “That is the badge of the Northwest Volunteer Army. There are not many people left who wear it, and I am the last man who will ever sit in this office to do so, which is the natural way of things. My generation has had our day, and now it’s the turn of others. Including you.”
She pointed to a picture. “Who is that man?”
“His name is Edward Langenheimer. He died very young, and he is the reason I am sitting here today, wearing medals that should have gone to him, and would have if that was the way it has played out. I am here because of what he did, and you are here because of what I and many others did.”
“I don’t understand,” said the little girl.
“You will when you get bigger,” promised the old man.
“Annie!” came a voice from the door. A pretty young woman and an SS officer in dress black stood in the doorway. The girl looked flustered and the SS man looked embarrassed. “Stop bothering the president! I’m sorry, I don’t know how she got away from me…”
“That’s quite all right, Mary.”
“Sorry, sir, she slipped by me,” said the guard. “She’s just so little I must not have noticed her.”
“You need to be a bit more on the ball, Lieutenant. The ONR might be employing hit leprechauns.”
“President McTeer, your limo is on the airpad. You’ll have the usual escort down to Portland,” the officer told him.
The president glanced at his watch. “I’m not due on the rostrum for another hour. Plenty of time.”
“Can I go?” asked Annie.
“Mmmm, I don’t think so,” said McTeer. “It will only be grownups, there are going to be a lot of speeches besides mine which will bore you to tears—which will probably in fact bore me to tears—and I will be staying up way too late to get you home in time for your bedtime. I’ll tell you what you can do for me though. I will make you Minster of Heavy Industry, and you can sit here and read this report for me and tell me what to do about our energy-to-output ratios, which are not what they should be.” The little girl frowned. “Or you can go down to the kitchen and ask Eleanor to give you some ice cream.”
“Ice cream!” said the little girl immediately.
“Good choice. Now go with Mommy.” Instead she ran out the door like a streak of lightning.
“She’s headed for the
kitchen,” said his granddaughter-in-law.
“I need to get moving, but before I go, any word from Mike?” asked the president, picking up his briefcase and his overcoat.
“Annie and I talked to him at Tycho Station via satellite link last night. He looks well and he did some moon-gravity gymnastics in front of the camera for Annie, held himself up on one finger, talked to her while he was standing on his head, that kind of thing.”
“Hmm,” said McTeer, shaking his head. “You know, when I first joined the Party, nobody had walked on the moon for almost fifty years. The Americans made it there a few times, and then they just gave up. They decided they’d rather pay niggers and Mexicans to have babies. Now a century later we’re back again. Guess it was all worth it after all.”
The girl reached out and touched the Old NVA badge on his lapel. “Mr. President… yes, it was worth it. All of it. There’s not much I can say except thank you, sir. From me, from Annie, from all of us. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said the old man.
Table of Contents
FREEDOM’S SONS
CONTENTS
PART ONE AFTER THE FIRE
PART TWO THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT
PART THREE THE GODS OF THE DAWN
PART FOUR BORDERTOWNS
EPILOGUE