The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “They have to understand that we are doing with the gun what the American politicians promised for 50 years and never delivered,” concluded Zack.

  “By George, I think he’s got it!” exclaimed Morehouse excitedly.

  “How do we go about it exactly?” asked Zack.

  “Blacks are simple,” said Morehouse with a shrug. “You shoot a few and make it clear to the rest of them that remaining in the Pacific Northwest is hazardous to their health. Let them know the Boss Man is back, as the Old Man said in his nationwide address on October 22nd. You’ll get some who’ll go on television and swagger and beat their chests like King Kong and go booga booga booga about how brave they are, and how no cracker woodchuck racists gonna run dere black asses outa nowhere, all that happy horse shit. You shoot them, too. It won’t take long for the message to sink in. Blacks have a kind of racial instinct about whites. They know the difference between the Boss Man and Dilbert, and they know who they can Mau Mau and who they can’t. Once they know de ole massah be back, they’ll break the plantation. Bugger boys ditto. No faggot in his right mind will want to stay here once they understand that by doing so, they’re risking a hot lead enema. Mexicans are a more complex problem,” Morehouse went on. “There’s an economic factor there. Mexicans are here because capitalists employ them. Some of those employers are rich white people who want their pools cleaned, and their lawns trimmed, and their children nannied while they go out every day dressed for success, sure, but mostly it’s the big corporations who have brought in all this mud, everything labor-intensive from flipping burgers to stacking pallets to mass farming in agribusiness.”

  “Which is one reason why whites are so poor these days,” pointed out Coyle. “There are no entry-level jobs for white kids anymore, except in the military, which I’ve always suspected was part of the hidden agenda. Whites aren’t eligible for affirmative action, so unless you’re one of the lucky few whose parents can afford to send you to college and you’re smart enough to get some kind of techie degree while you’re there, you’re stuck in blue-collar or white-collar poverty forever. I laugh my ass off at these feminist Barbie Dolls in the natty business suits and briefcases who go through years of college and get a masters degree in business administration or something equally useless, and who then end up working as word processors or secretaries for temp agencies or bank tellers until they’re 45 years old. They wanted a career, but all they ended up with was a job, and a shitty one at that.”

  “At least they can get some kind of white-collar office job,” said Morehouse. “Right now a white male who can’t get into college and go high techie once he’s there is in deep shit. He gets a degree in business or liberal arts or something like that, and he ends up driving an ice cream truck or delivering pizzas. We need to put a stop to that crap. The employers are the key. To get rid of the beaners we don’t just go around blasting them on the corner, although there needs to be some of that, of course, to get them motivated. We go for the employers, without whom there would never have been any problem to begin with. We need to deprive capitalism of this vast pool of cheap Third World labor they’ve imported into this country and force them to start investing in real human resources again, to hire ten white people at a decent wage and train them and motivate them and keep them, instead of just hiring a hundred Mexicans off the street corner every two months or calling a temp agency for a no-benefits, minimum-wage office drudge. We have to open the job market for whites again, so they can at least do like our grandfathers did, get a start in some company even if it’s only on the production line or in the warehouse, and work their way up.”

  “The big shots will yell and scream that it’s not competitive in a global economy,” Hatfield chuckled.

  “Fuck that,” said Red succinctly. “Contrary to capitalist myth, the economy is not some kind of primal force of nature that just does what it wants like the weather. It is in fact possible to plan and manage an economy to some degree, provided the men doing it don’t have their heads up their asses and they have some moral sense of civitas. Permanent employment of white people with full benefits worked fine for almost a century, when American companies made their products here in America, marketed their products here in America, and treated their employees at least somewhat like human beings instead of widgets to be thrown away and replaced by a Mexican or outsourced when they wore out. There is no reason on the face of the earth why that system couldn’t work again if there is some kind of political will at the top to make it happen, which there will be in the Republic we are fighting to establish. We can take the first step now, and show the people of the Northwest proof of our pudding, so to speak. We have to re-open entry-level jobs to whites, because when they get that first paycheck they will know who they have to thank for it. When the word gets out that despite all the insurgency trouble, there are jobs for white people in the Northwest, real jobs, then we’ll start getting migrants even in the middle of a civil war.”

  “So how do we defeat the might of globalized world market forces?” asked Hatfield curiously.

  Morehouse drew his sidearm and held it up. It was a Son of Sam Special, a Charter Arms .44-caliber revolver. “One of these makes a hell of a presentation,” he said with a grin. “I don’t think it will be too difficult to persuade some corporate executive to see our point of view when he’s looking down a gun barrel. Oh, it won’t be that easy. They’ll try all the usual crap, outsourcing and eventually shutting down their companies and trying to flee the Northwest for Guatemala or someplace rather than employ white people at a living wage. They’ll think we can’t find them and wire something to their car ignitions in New York or St. Louis or wherever their corporate headquarters are. They’ll soon be disillusioned on that score.”

  “I’ve never been to New York,” said Hatfield wistfully.

  “You haven’t missed anything,” Coyle told him.

  “I wasn’t planning on missing.”

  “That’s for the future, though,” Morehouse went on. “Right now, what you guys on the ground need to do is deal locally with direct managers. You just go into a place that employs Mexicans or Chinese or whatever, wearing your ski masks at first, then later you won’t need to because no one will dare to try and stop you. You politely explain to the boss or the manager that come Monday morning there had better not be a single brown face in his establishment, or else there will be all kinds of physical experimentation done upon his carcass. If he tries to pass the buck to the head office or something like that, explain to him that the head office isn’t going to go upside his head with a baseball bat if he doesn’t do what he’s told. You will. Do not burn down or blow up the factory or the business unless it seems really necessary to make your point. Remember, white people need those jobs the illegals will be vacating, and there will be some white employees there whom we don’t need blaming the NVA for losing their jobs. No need to get too heavy about it. We’ve already littered the landscape with enough corpses so they’ll know we’re serious. There’s nothing like killing people to convince others that they’d damned well better listen to what you have to say. For 50 years, we were never taken seriously. We were a joke and everybody knew it, because we never had the nerve to fire these things,” Morehouse said, putting his pistol away. “We were not willing to spill blood or to put our own lives and bodies at risk for what we claimed to believe, and everyone knew this about us. They held us in contempt, and rightly so. Now we’re pulling triggers, and you will find that all of a sudden, people pay attention.”

  * * *

  The next afternoon, back in Astoria, Zack ran down that part of the conversation for the other two members of his Trouble Trio. “Of course, we need something in our hands to get everyone’s attention with,” he concluded. “We need to start assembling more of an arsenal than we’ve got. Any ideas on that, quartermaster?” he asked Len.

  “A good one,” said Ekstrom. “I think we need to go see old Bert Fields.”

  “Astoria’s Mr. Second Am
endment himself? Yeah, I remember Bert from when I used to go to gun shows, back when I still had some money to buy,” said Hatfield. “I believe he has quite a collection.”

  “Yeah, he’s got every federal firearms license the BATFE can issue, including a couple of them he had to take the Bureau to court to get them to grant him,” said Len. “He’s rich enough to hire decent lawyers, and so he won. The NRA was always able to spread enough cash around Congress so that technically speaking, we do still have the right to keep and bear arms, it’s just that the federal government doesn’t want white people exercising that right, and so they put every conceivable stumbling block in our way, hoping to make it so expensive and so much trouble that we’ll just say to hell with it and give up our guns voluntarily. Bert never did, though. He’s fought the BATFE tooth and nail in court every time they tried to fuck with him over something in his collection.”

  “Yeah, I remember some of his news coverage,” chipped in Washburn. “Like that time he demanded the right to keep a howitzer on his front lawn.”

  “He lost that one, but he won most of the other cases,” Ekstrom reminded them. “I’ve been to his house to work on some of his pieces. You wouldn’t believe it, Zack. He has a prefab hangar in his back yard, and it looks like a combination museum and National Guard armory inside. Bert’s a genuine collector; he’s got everything in there from full-auto Kalashnikovs to a matchlock musket, and ammo for all of them. Must be two or three hundred weapons of various kinds, most of which we could use if only on a once-off basis and then throw away.”

  “What’s his security like?” asked Hatfield.

  “Everything the law and twenty thousand federal regulations require,” said Ekstrom. “Locked steel cabinets, every longarm chained to the rack through the trigger guard, trigger locks on all the handguns, a stack of documents a mile high filed with the BATFE for every weapon. The building itself has steel vault doors, sealed windows, motion detectors and an alarm connected with the cop shop downtown, all that blather.”

  “Going to be a hard crib to crack,” said Washburn. “And will the three of us be able to transport all those guns once we get inside?”

  “We may not have to crack it,” said Ekstrom. “I’ve gotten to know Bert fairly well down through the years as a fellow gun nut. He was always pretty conservative and right wing.”

  “Maybe so, but the NVA isn’t right wing,” said Hatfield. “We’re revolutionary, and a lot of us are outright Nazis, including me. We’re out to save our race. Conservatives only want to save their money.”

  “Mmmm, maybe,” conceded Len. “I don’t know, though. He’s let a few things slip that lead me to believe he might be approachable. The past few years have been a real eye-opener for Bert and a lot of people like him. They started out believing all that yay-hoo propaganda after 9/11, waving their Amurrican flags and stomping and cheering for Jug-Ears when he started this endless war in the Middle East, staring like brain-dead zombies at Fox News and swallowing whatever crap the neocons dished out. Of course for most folks, a lot of that was finally finding a group of people with dark skins whom white people were legally allowed to hate. They projected their real loathing for niggers and Mexicans onto poor old Apu down at the Quickie Mart. Then as the war ground on for year after year, some of the sharper right wingers like Bert started noticing the contradictions, the little things here and there that didn’t quite fit in with the official version of events.”

  “Like the fact that every petroleum-grabbing invasion the United States has carried out has turned into a fiasco?” asked Hatfield.

  “That, of course, but other things as well,” replied Ekstrom. “I think one of the best unintended consequences to come out of this Middle East crusade of ours has been that it’s no longer possible to keep the central role of Israel in all this discreetly in the background, like the establishment used to do. The little man behind the curtain has finally been forced out into the open. I’ve actually heard Bert pass a few remarks questioning the official version of 9/11, and hinting that Israel might have had something to do with it in order to drag America into the Middle East, after that second intifada in the early 2000s, when it became apparent that the kikes were losing their military edge over the Arabs and wouldn’t be able to fend off the entire Muslim world forever.”

  Hatfield whistled. “Questioning 9/11? That’s a dime in the federal pen for hatespeech right there,” he said. “What is that particular section called? ‘Propagating malicious and baseless conspiracy theory regarding the government of the United States or any of its allies?’”

  “Yah, only of course we all know that only one United States ally is meant,” said Ekstrom. “Look, let me have a talk with Bert. No need for him to know about you two. He knows me from way back and I don’t think he’ll rat me out, but if he does, I’ll be the only one compromised. I think I can persuade him to give us some or all of his weapons, rather than us have to plan a complex and risky heist.”

  “Okay, give it a shot,” agreed Hatfield somewhat reluctantly. “Just be careful, take it slow and easy, and the second you get any bad vibes off him, you back off. There’s still only three of us, remember, and I don’t want to have to go looking for another quartermaster.”

  That evening Bert Fields was surprised to receive an unannounced visit from his old shooting buddy and gunsmith Lennart Ekstrom at his spacious sixteen-room Victorian mansion high on the beetling brow of the long ridge overlooking Astoria. “Come on in, Len,” said Fields, nothing loath, inviting Ekstrom into his den. “Take a load off. Mary Lou’s over at her sister’s place. Hannah’s health hasn’t been too good lately.” Fields and his wife were both well into their 70s. He was the retired director of an electronic circuit board manufacturing company in Portland that had been bought out and relocated to India, but they’d given him a generous golden parachute, and he had moved to Astoria and spent the last twenty years investing that golden parachute with skill and success in everything from real estate to gold coins to European securities. He was easily a millionaire. “Can I get you a drink?” Fields offered. “Cognac? Bourbon? Name your poison.”

  “Ginger ale will be fine, if you’ve got it.” Ekstrom replied. “I don’t drink anymore.”

  “No? You got better sense than I have, then,” chuckled the old man as he opened a small fridge under the wet bar in his den and pulled out a can of ginger ale and a plastic cup, into which he dropped some ice. He handed the soft drink to Ekstrom and poured a generous cognac for himself. “Want a cigar? Got some Macanudo Supremes.”

  “You might not feel so hospitable when you know why I’ve come, Bert,” said Ekstrom.

  “Oh?” Fields replied in surprise.

  “I’ll get right to the point, although it may not sound like it at first,” said Ekstrom. “Just bear with me for a bit.” He pointed to a photograph on Fields’ mantel that showed several young naval officers on the flight deck of an old carrier. “You mentioned once that was taken when you were on the Kitty Hawk launching air attacks against North Vietnam?”

  “Yep,” replied Fields nostalgically. “That’s me on the left, Al Vitelli on the right, and Bret Halsted in the center. Al died of cancer a few years ago, and Bret died in Atlanta federal penitentiary. He told a nigger joke and he got five years for hatespeech. Judge went light on him because of his age. He was 64. The first day the guards simply turned him into the yard and the black gang members beat him to death.” Fields’ voice was nonchalant and light, as if he were discussing the weather. Ekstrom hadn’t known about the death of Fields’ old navy buddy. It was an unexpected plus.

  “That feeds right into what I want to talk to you about,” he said in a steady voice. “Bert, the America that we once knew, that we were born into, the America that you fought for in ‘Nam, that America is now gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. It is gone forever. It will never come back. I need to know if you understand this, if you accept it. Because if you don’t, then there’s no point in my continuing with what I have to
say.”

  “Of course I understand!” growled Fields, knocking back his cognac and heading to the bar for another. “I thank God every day that I’m old enough and rich enough so Mary Lou and I will be able to die in some comfort before this monstrosity comes crashing down around everyone’s ears. I thank God that our children are all decent and loving men and women, and if their mother and I have to go into the hospital they won’t connive with some Jew doctor to slip us the hot shot under the Put The Old Folks Down Like Dogs Act, sorry, the Senior Citizens’ Quality of Life Act, so they can get this house and get our money. That’s happened to some of our friends, you know, since those carrion-eaters in Congress passed that goddamned law. I turn on CNN every morning, and it’s all I can do to restrain myself from vomiting up my breakfast. Yes, Len, I understand that the United States of America has turned into a stinking latrine pit piled high with corpses and blood and shit. So why the hell do you ask?”

  “Because I want a favor from you,” returned Len, going for broke. “I want you to take Mary Lou and maybe Hannah on a short little vacation somewhere for a few days. A Christmas shopping trip would be a good cover. Before you go, I want you to give me the security codes to the driveway gate into this house, and to the doors to your outbuilding in the back. When you come back, you will be shocked and upset to learn that you have been the victim of a burglary. Some person or persons unknown will have broken into your annex, and all of your guns and ammo will be gone.”