The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Am I allowed to ask what we’re going to do when we get there?” said Kicky. “If so, can I ask who and why? Or is this a shut up and obey orders kind of thing? I’m kind of curious.”

  “It’s not a hit,” said Wingo with a laugh. “Like the CO said, we’re starting you off light. This is a punishment beating, and it’s part of our procedure to make sure that every Volunteer on an action knows what we’re doing, who we’re doing it to, and why. It’s important for morale for everyone to understand that we’re not just gangsters mindlessly obeying Don Vito. There is a purpose to everything the Army does. The target is a man named Gregory Booth. White, aged 35, married with two children, degree in psychology, a churchgoing type, no bad habits we know of, not a bad guy, really. He’s just doing something we have to put a stop to. Booth is a guidance counselor at a local high school, and probably because of his 700 Club and other evangelical affiliations, he’s pretty neocon in his outlook. Supports the endless wars in the Middle East because we have to have Armageddon over there to make Jesus come back, really into the whole red-white-and-blue moo, you get the idea. The saddest kind of enemy we’ve got, a white man who has bought into the whole Amurrican bill of goods and really believes it. You remember what I said about George Orwell’s comment, that seeing what is right under one’s nose requires a constant effort? Booth either cannot or will not make that effort. His eyes and his ears and his mind should have told him long ago that Amurrica is a disease that needs to be eradicated for the good of humanity, but he either cannot or will not allow himself to re-think his position. Anyway, Booth has been running the Teaching Tolerance program at his high school, and that would have put him on our list in itself, but lately he’s started a kind of informal club or secret society among some of his students of all races, mostly of the evangelical persuasion. He calls it ‘Jesus Loves The Little Children,’ if you can believe that.”

  “Oh, yuck, a damned Christian preppy type,” said Kicky in disgust. “I had a guidance counselor like that in high school, too. He wanted to save me from my life of sin, and then one night he decided he wanted to do some sinning with me himself. Bastard.”

  “Actually, this guy seems to be fairly straight up. We haven’t picked up on anything like that,” conceded Wingo. “But this little club of his has another kind of sinister undertone to it. It involves the kids in his circle listening in on the other students, doing some snooping in lockers and notebooks and bathrooms and so on, and reporting back to Booth on anyone, student or teacher, who says or does anything politically incorrect or that might indicate racial tendencies or even sympathy with the Nationalist cause. The Party has ears in all the high schools, going back to before the 10/22 revolt, and we got wind of it pretty quick. He’s not collecting that kind of information for nothing. He’s either passed it on to ZOG already, or else he’s about to do so. This doesn’t sound like an actual law enforcement operation. Too amateurish. We think he’s just a self-appointed guardian of public morals like so many Christians are, running a game on a bunch of dumb kids who think it’s cool to play Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys for truth, justice, and the Amurrican way. Betray a bigot for Jesus, that kind of shit. So tonight, some of the Boys are going to have a quiet word of prayer with Mr. Booth, using some blunt instruments.”

  “So why not just kill him? I thought General Order Number Seven gave the death penalty for informing?” asked Kicky.

  “Not exactly,” corrected Wingo. “It says field commanders have authority to deal with it at their discretion. True, usually informing means a bullet in the head, especially if it’s for money, but sometimes it needs a lighter touch to send the right message. The message we’re going to send tonight works on multiple levels. First, it tells Booth and anyone who may be tempted to emulate him that if you fuck with the NVA, we will find out about it, and very quickly. Secondly, it lets whites know that we really don’t want to kill our own people unless it’s absolutely necessary, and of course we don’t. Like the Old Man said, this will inevitably turn into a civil war between whites, and once all this is over, the survivors of both sides are going to have to live together in the Northwest Republic. We’re looking ahead to that time, and we want to create as little bad blood as possible. Finally, there’s the religion thing. Killing Christians only encourages them. They thrive on martyrdom, and persecution is largely the secret of the faith’s survival for all these centuries. We don’t want to make Booth a dead martyr, we want him to be a visible wreck in a wheelchair eating through a straw for some months, in clear and evident pain. Everyone will know that we could have killed him if we’d wanted to. We can only hope that most folks will understand this and draw the proper conclusion. Okay, here’s the turn.”

  Kicky followed the Crown Victoria down a broad, tree-lined residential street. The afternoon was overcast but not raining, and visibility was good. “This street will be our action zone. Drive down it slow but not too slow. We always do one preliminary pass through a target zone, but only one, so as not to attract attention. You have to check the whole area out in one sweep. As you go by, check every parked car on your left, since you’re driving. Your partner will always check on the right, in this case Mr. Rogers. Look for anyone sitting in parked cars or any vehicle with tinted windows, which will be a cop car. Also any parked vans or trucks on the street or in driveways that might contain enemy troops in ambush. Look for linemen and cable guys up telephone polls, gardeners in yards who don’t seem to be gardening, anything that looks out of place or might indicate that something isn’t right. Look for anything that might block your escape route. Now, glance over on your right. The redwood Brady Bunch split-level ranch special? That’s Booth’s house. The SUV in the driveway is his, so he should be in.” Wingo checked his watch. “Probably within about five minutes of starting out on his daily jog. We’ve been clocking him for some days now. Okay, up here is where we split up. The Crown Vic will go right. You go left.” Kicky complied. “Okay, right turn here and go up about two blocks. Watch out for kids on bikes and all that crap. Okay, now another right. Down one block, now right again, and now we’re back on our street. Both of you keep your eyes peeled. Okay, there’s his house again on the left. Go past it. Now pull over and park here, on the right side of the street.” Kicky did so. “The lead car will be here in a minute. They’re checking the parallel streets and the rear of the house. Adjust your mirrors so you can see the front door and the street in front of the house.” While Kicky was doing so, Mr. Rogers wordlessly handed Jimmy an Uzi submachine gun over the back seat and several extra magazines. She glanced back and saw Rogers jacking a shell into a sawed-off pump shotgun.

  “I thought you were just going to beat the guy up? So why all the heavy artillery?”

  “Normally a punishment beating is an eight man, two car job,” said Wingo. “I know that sounds like a lot to beat the crap out of a single guy, but it’s a principle of street fighting. A guerrilla force needs to compensate for the enemy’s overall superiority in numbers by applying superior force at selected weak points and pressure points. They outgun us here in the city of Portland, but we always try to make sure that wherever we strike, at that one small point we outgun them. We’re a bit short handed tonight. There are three men in the lead car. Two of them will administer the actual punishment, while the driver will stand by his vehicle armed with an AK-47, and Mr. Rogers and I will cover the attack from here with these weapons. The object is to prevent any interference by good Samaritans and also to resist, escape, and evade if the cops show or if this turns out to be an ambush. Any time we have enough Volunteers, an actual assault team or hit man is covered on at least two sides against interference and flanking attacks.”

  “Do I get out and cover them as well?” asked Kicky.

  “Sure, why not?” Wingo reached into the glove box and pulled out two lumps of blue wool. “This is your mask. Don’t put it on until I tell you to. If somebody looks out their window or walks by taking their pooch for a dump and sees three people sitting in
a car with ski masks on, that kind of gives the game away. There’s the lead car.” The Crown Victoria pulled up a hundred feet or so behind them and parked on the far side of the street, just past the edge of Booth’s lawn. Wingo’s phone beeped. He listened briefly. “Sorry, man, Fred just left for work. Want me to take a message? Okay, fine.”

  “You guys have some cool rides,” remarked Kicky. “By the by, thanks for the Camry.”

  “Don’t mention it. When we’re doing a tickle in Lake Oswego like this, we need to use vehicles that fit in with the neighborhood. If we were down on 82nd Avenue we’d be in pickup trucks or panel vans or 15-year-old beater cars. Right, our boy seems to be a creature of habit, so he should be out the door any moment now. As soon as we see him, we mask. He always jogs the same way, turning right toward the park, but if he doesn’t go that way this time, we may have to run him down, which Mr. Rogers and I will do. If that happens you stay with the car. If he sticks to pattern, as he passes the lead car, the two designated Volunteers will jump out, do the old Lizzie Borden trick and give him forty whacks. There’s a certain science to a good thumping. You go for the kneecaps, the elbows, the kidneys, the groin, and the mouth. Never the head, unless you intend to kill the target. When he throws up his arms you hit them hard enough to break them. This normally wouldn’t take more than twenty seconds, but like I said, these two biff boys are first-timers themselves, so they may take a little longer. While this is going on, Mr. Rogers and I will be out of the car and covering the street. You get out of the car and cover the sidewalk to your right, to make sure we don’t get any nasty surprises from that side. Level your pistol two-handed like you know what you’re doing. If by any chance you see anyone coming toward us who looks like some idiot civilian with a John Wayne complex, fire a shot over his head to get his attention. If he keeps on coming, Rog or I will deal with him.” In the rear view mirror, Kicky saw the front door to Greg Booth’s house open and a man in a running suit with iPod headphones in his ears stepped out the door. “That’s him,” said Wingo. “Masks on.” Kicky pulled the mask over her face and adjusted the eye slits. “Out of the car.”

  Kicky opened the door of the Nissan and pointed her weapon to her right, but she couldn’t resist turning to watch what was going on behind her. The doors of the Crown Vic were open and the two masked attackers were on the man in the jogging suit, one swinging a baseball bat and the other an axe handle in a high arc, while the driver stood with his back to them, his Kalashnikov leveled down the empty street. Kicky could hear the soft thwack of blow after blow, and she heard Gregory Booth screaming in a high-pitched squeal, like a pig being slaughtered.

  Unbidden the memory of the little room in the Justice Center arose in her, the needles and the electrodes, the abduction of her child, her own humiliation and rage and suffering at the hands of men like Gregory Booth. Any twinge of pity she might have felt was drowned in rage and hate and exultation at the pain of the man being beaten. This American loved and supported the evil people and the evil society that had dragged her brother and her lover to be butchered in Iraq, that had turned her into a whore, that had sent her to prison, that had stolen her baby. He and his kind had never shown her or her loved ones the slightest bit of mercy, and he deserved none himself. Do unto others as others do unto you, she thought bitterly.

  The three masked men got back into the Crown Victoria, and the engine started. They left a twitching, moaning pile of dirty laundry lying on the sidewalk, soaking the concrete red. “Back in the car,” ordered Wingo. “Start her up and take her out of this street, slow. Keep your mask on until we’ve got a few blocks behind us. Okay, now turn right.” Behind her the Crown Victoria turned left. “They’ll go a separate route. Now head for I-5 North, and go on back into town. Normally after every mission there’s a debriefing and critique at a safe house or other rendezvous point, but this one seems to have gone so perfectly that I really don’t see much need.” Wingo opened his phone, dialed, and spoke. “How’s it going. Yeah, same here. Good job, guys.” He closed his phone. “The same to you two. Well, Comrade Jodie, looks like you’ve done your first tickle. How do you feel?”

  “Fine!” chirped Kicky, and she did.

  X

  Sharkbait

  And let me speak to the yet unknowing world

  How these things came about; so shall you hear

  Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts;

  Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;

  Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause . . .

  Hamlet—Act V, Scene 5

  Over the next few months, Kicky went out on over a dozen missions for the NVA, always acting as a driver, in addition to continuing her role as a chauffeur for mysterious text-message hails who wanted to visit the hot sauce factory. Later on the hot sauce factory became Bill’s Bowlerama as the code changed, and finally it became the Chestnut Tree Café. (“Who the hell is the George Orwell freak among these sociopaths?” muttered Lainie when she heard the last designation.) The active service missions occurred on her days off, or else after she got off her Excelsior Cab shift at midnight, and they followed a similar pattern. She was never asked to use her cab on a tickle. Always she would drive her own car to a designated meeting place, park it, and then take over the driver’s seat in one of a multiple-vehicle NVA team. On two occasions, there was only one vehicle. These single-car missions turned out to be surveillance jobs wherein her passenger acted as observer, scouting out not people, but locations where an action might possibly be arranged to go down, driving from point to point and timing it, checking cross streets for entry and escape points, so forth and so on. During these runs Kicky drove everything from a Crown Victoria town car, possibly the same one she had seen on the Lake Oswego tickle, to a mini-bus, to a battered pick-up truck, and once a BMW X Series with full leather seats.

  Sometimes Jimmy Wingo would ride with her in her vehicle, and sometimes not. She began to meet some of her NVA comrades on a repeating basis. There was the blandly psychotic Mr. Rogers in his trademark cardigan, who always yelled “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood!” just before he kneecapped somebody or threw a pipe bomb. (“Dammit, I grew up on Mr. Rogers! I learned to speak English watching his show!” snapped Lainie angrily.) There was a tall and slender young man with an Elvis hairdo called Ace, not bad looking, but who was all business and whom Kicky never saw smile. There was a small and innocuous-looking man of about 50 with graying hair, who used the name Fred, and who said even less than most of them. He seemed to be some kind of bomb specialist, as he always carried a satchel or a backpack full of Molotov cocktails or other hand-hurled explosives that he distributed to the others. There was a stocky, cheerful brown-haired girl named Lavonne who would have been pretty except for a broken nose. Lavonne was about Kicky’s age. She sometimes drove the second car with a pale and intense youth named Kevin, whom Kicky in her mind took to be Lavonne’s boyfriend. This was incorrect, as she later learned. She and these other Volunteers occasionally exchanged a few words at a rendezvous point, but Kicky had no chance to get to know any of them better.

  Then there were two big, bearded biker types, possibly brothers, with bulging muscles and prison tattoos. They who laughed a lot, and they specialized in punishment beatings. They called themselves Thing One and Thing Two. (“God damn them!” howled Lainie when she heard their handles. “Now these sons of bitches are defiling Doctor Seuss! Who’s next? Barney the dinosaur?” Kicky couldn’t resist answering, “I think he’s B Company,” which got her a dirty look from Lainie in return.) Kicky learned they were the ones who had beaten the guidance counselor down to the sidewalk on their first time out. Kicky got the definite impression that although new to the NVA, they had prior experience in the field. Thing One offered a few appreciative comments in the car on Kicky’s body art and the body beneath it, making it clear that he wouldn’t object to furthering their acquaintance off-duty. Since she had no desire to complicate things any worse than they were, and since she wa
sn’t sure how she was expected either as a Volunteer in training or as a police informant to comport herself along those lines, Kicky lightly and deftly fended him off. Thing One impressed her immensely by getting the message quickly, and dropping it. Ironically, in view of some of the romantic misconceptions about the urban guerrilla lifestyle she had picked up from TV and the movies, it occurred to Kicky that her time with Jerry Reb was the longest she had gone without sex of some kind or other since she was fifteen.

  Kicky never knew ahead of time what she would be doing on a mission. The first few times out, there were no actual homicides committed. There were more punishment beatings of white liberals or people who had otherwise contrived to annoy the NVA, similar to the Lake Oswego job, all of them as swift and deadly as her first and all of which ran as seamlessly. Kicky marveled at the amount of time and effort put into the advance preparation of such relatively minor operations. “You know the old carpenter’s saying about measuring twice, so you only have to cut once,” said Wingo. “Floats can be a bitch, though. Most of the times when our Volunteers get into trouble, it’s during a float, when there’s no time to properly set it all up. But we have to take targets of opportunity wherever and whenever they offer, keep them off balance, make sure we keep on hitting them and hitting them, never letting them rest, never letting the cops and feds finish cleaning up one crime scene before they have to move on to another. Everything we do, Comrade Jodie, is just a pinprick. But thousands of little pinpricks put together can slowly bleed the Beast to death.”

  There were other missions besides punishment beatings. The actions of the rural NVA units such as Zack Hatfield’s D Company, whose flamboyant attacks had generated for them the media nickname “the Wild Bunch,” had successfully driven most of the Mexicans and the few blacks out of large portions of the Northwest hinterland in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia. Many of the mestizos didn’t stop running until they got to California, but some only ran as far as the big cities, and so temporarily at least there was actually a slight increase in the number of non-whites in Portland suburbs such as Hillsboro, McMinnville, and North Portland. The urban teams of the Portland brigades then took over the task of persuading them to vamanos from the Northwest as a whole, permanently. At least half of Kicky’s tickles involved burning out or blowing up various Mexican hangouts, with or without the Mexicans inside, or else businesses known to employ illegals, including a construction site, a warehouse on the river front, and a commercial laundry owned by Jews and run by a Chinese straw boss with illegal coolie labor. These missions involved the approach to the target, one scouting tour through the area looking for potential problems, and then covering down and preventing interference while Fred and other volunteers hurled incendiaries through windows. In one case they broke in the front door, set charges, and lifted the whole building off its foundations via a remote detonator as the NVA drove away. On another occasion a mob of yelling Mexicans emerged drunk, cursing and threatening in Spanish from a firebombed cantina, waving knives, while a couple of them fired wildly into the street with handguns. Wingo and the two Things got out of their cars, masked, and calmly dispersed them with short, controlled bursts of automatic weapons fire. Kicky saw on the news the next day that two of the Hispanics were killed, although she didn’t see any actually fall to the ground and die. She wasn’t sure whether or not this counted as making her bones. Probably not, she decided, since she never fired her pistol. At no time did she ever see any signs of any police presence or any attempt by the cops to interfere. She wondered if somehow Lainie Martinez was ordering them to back off from her vicinity.