The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Gentile Hollywood people have been conditioned all their lives to a second-class status in their own world, in their work, and in their thoughts and their public utterances,” said Red Morehouse. “To them the Jewish control of their existence seems to be a law of nature, an immutable fact of life. Anyone who dares to stand up against it, or who makes a drunken slip like even the biggest stars like Max Garrett sometimes do, is crushed. But no one who has to live under Jewish rule likes it, and no one who is confronted on a daily basis with Jews in the flesh likes them as individuals. In a way, we’re trying to show the stars and the genuine film artists down there the same thing we’re trying to show our own people here in the Homeland—that it is possible to resist, and that the enemy is not invincible.”

  “Which brings us to our own debut,” said Randall with an evil chuckle. “Gents, I am sure you’ve all seen the great blood and gore flicks of the past. Halloween. Friday the Thirteenth. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Prom Night. Black Christmas. Well, the Northwest Volunteer Army is going to add another memorable date to the calendar of Hollywood horror. The one that will beat all those other nights of horror all to hell and gone, the goriest splatterfest of them all.” He leered and leaned forward as he hoarsely stage-whispered:

  “Oscar Night!”

  XVIII

  All The World’s A Stage

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players.

  They have their exits and their entrances,

  And one man in his time plays many parts.

  As You Like It—Act II, Scene 7

  It took several weeks to collect all the personnel of Task Force Director’s Cut, move them down to the Los Angeles area, and get them settled into a series of safe houses and apartments, along with a carefully selected complement of weapons, ammunition and supplies. Pascarella and his bomb crew set up their own separate EOD unit in a rented garage in Seal Beach. The Annual Award Presentation Ceremony of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was the actual, formal name of Oscar night, traditionally took place in late February or sometimes in March. This year the awards ceremony was scheduled for a Monday in early March, which gave the Volunteers only a few more weeks to plan and implement their attack, or else they would be forced to wait another year.

  The NVA was assisted immeasurably by one of the operatives of the Army’s Third Section who lived and worked in the film community, a mild-mannered and opaque man referred to, on the rare occasions when it was necessary to refer to him at all, as “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” This was the code name for Barry Brewer, a Hollywood talent agent who had chosen his own nom de guerre. (“Talent agent, talented, get it?” he explained to the few who were in on his secret.) Brewer looked like a podiatrist or an accountant, slim and middle-aged and slightly pallid, but he was a lifelong Tinseltowner with celluloid in his blood who had never worked anywhere else or thought of working anywhere else. He knew the town and the people and the industry like the back of his hand. He had built up a lifetime of connections in high and low places, which he placed at the disposal of the NVA when his slow-burning hatred of the Jews and what they had done simply snapped one day, and in a moment of cosmic clarity, Barry Brewer knew what he had to do. He picked up the telephone and made a call to a detective agency in Vancouver, British Columbia, and asked to speak to a private dick he’d used on some background checks and other petty stuff, a man whom he had reason to believe harbored politically incorrect thoughts. In this belief Brewer was correct. Through a long and convoluted chain of events Brewer was eventually brought into contact with Wayne Hill, and the rest, as they say, became history.

  Brewer was hooked into the Hollywood scene on every level; he knew everyone from the security guard on the parking lot gate at Tri-Star, to every independent producer on contract with 21st Century Fox, to the makeup artists at CBS television, and he could get a call returned by almost anybody in town except for the biggest studio heads and the first-string stars and celebrities. But except for a small number of people in the industry who really were in the know, he was never thought of as a connected guy. Being a Gentile, Brewer was peripheral as far as Big Hollywood went, but in one sense that was an advantage, because it enabled him to stay well below the radar. Non-Jews in his line of work were considered such minor players that they were almost invisible. No one gossiped about Barry, no paparazzi followed him, no reporters for the industry rags or the tabloids hounded him for quotes or inside info. Not being Jewish or gay, it was simply assumed that he had no inside info to give. The result was that he was able to accomplish a whole range of difficult logistic and supply-related tasks for the NVA without so much as making a ripple in the cesspool, including putting up a whole crew of the Army’s heaviest hitters all around town.

  The command post was a penthouse apartment in Culver City. On the last day in February, a strategy session was convened for the team’s staff with Lieutenant Wayne Hill and Lieutenant Charlie Randall presiding, and The Talented Mr. Ripley present. It was agreed that while Brewer needed to keep his identity as secret as possible, since he formed the team’s base of local support in Los Angeles he needed to be known at least by sight to the leadership cadre. They had no idea how long any of them were going to last, and all of them needed to be able to hook up with Mr. Ripley in case of urgent need. The secondary leadership group consisted of Volunteer Jesse “Cat-Eyes” Lockhart, Volunteer Lee Washburn, Quartermaster Lt. Christina Ekstrom, and Volunteer Jimmy Wingo.

  “This will be the most significant mass assault on a Zionist target that the Northwest Volunteer Army has yet attempted,” said Hill. “It will also send an indelible message to the enemy and to the world, one that Hollywood is particularly able to understand. Do you remember the famous scene in The Godfather where the big Jew movie producer wakes up in the dawn, in his big mansion and his big bed with the silk sheets, and he looks over and he sees the severed head of his million-dollar race horse lying next to him in a bloody mess, and he screams and screams and screams and screams as the camera fades? That is the effect we are looking for in every sense of the word.”

  “I remember the producer caved in and gave the Godfather what he wanted,” said Christina, sitting on the couch. She was wearing her usual long-sleeved blouse to conceal her negroid-inflicted scars.

  “Exactly. And why?” asked Hill. “The big kike, the Burger King, caved because he suddenly understood that he was dealing with people to whom his power, his money, his influence and his personal viciousness meant nothing. For possibly the first time in his life, the big Jew was dealing with men who weren’t afraid of him and all he could command, and who would accept nothing less from him than total compliance and submission. That is the message we want to send, not only to the big Jews who rule Hollywood, but also to the whole world. The power of these people is at an end. This tickle is going to be our equivalent of a big bloody horse’s head in the Jews’ beds. But there is more to the message we are sending even than that. We want all of white America to see, and to think: If ZOG cannot protect the cream of Hollywood’s élite, then they can’t protect anybody. If ZOG can’t protect the powerful Jews of Hollywood, then maybe it’s time we got onto the winning side. That is why it is imperative that we hit the Oscar ceremony itself, live and on camera.”

  “Right, thanks to The Talented Mr. Ripley here, we have been able to score a few intelligence coups,” said Randall. “The primary organization responsible for security will be the Centurion Group, which also handled the last several Oscar shows. Mr. Ripley has been able to recruit an informant on the inside who has so far proven reliable, on the condition that after the fireworks we take him on as a Volunteer and take him Home with us. We have been able to get a very good assessment of the terrain and what we will be up against by way of enemy armed forces and security measures. I’ll let Rip here run all this down for you. Oscar and I have taken the guided tour of the target area, but Chris and Cat and Lee haven’t yet. I want every Volunteer to do
so within the next few days.”

  Hill nodded. “That’s essential. The Kodak Theater management kindly provides these tours for a mere ten dollars a head, from 10:30 to 2:30 every day, with tours departing every half hour. Go in pairs, one pair for each tour. I know there’s a risk they’ll ID some of us from security tapes later, but this is a major operation, and I want everyone as prepared as possible. Everyone needs to have a chance to look over our killing ground.”

  “I’ll organize it,” said Christina.

  “For the sake of these comrades who haven’t had the tour yet, though, could you go over the theater itself, Mr. Ripley?” asked Hill.

  “Certainly, Lieutenant. We have a bit of luck in that this year’s Oscars will be almost a carbon copy of last year’s, with one exception, which I will get into in due course,” said Brewer. “The awards ceremony will be held in the Kodak Theater in the Hollywood and Highland Center, which as you can guess from the name is situated on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. This is an eleven-acre complex in the center of Hollywood itself, built to look like an old movie set, specifically the set from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, which I find ironic in view of the monumental example of intolerance we are about to set.” There was laughter around the room. “I understand that they were actually able to run down and buy up a lot of surviving bits and pieces from that hundred year-old set, by the way. The Center is mostly a yuppie shopping mall catering to the wealthy upper crust and also, of course, to hordes of tourists and movie fans. In addition to all the usual boutiques and fern bars, upscale restaurants and souvenir knick-knack and junk shops, which don’t concern us except as possible obstacles, the Center also contains Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the sidewalk with all the stars’ footprints, the Kodak Theater, and the Hollywood Royale Hotel, the last two of which do concern us.

  “First, the theater itself,” Brewer went on. “It seats a little over 3,400 people, and the whole layout is as plush as it gets, deep carpet and large padded seats with velvet plum upholstery, snazzy fountain in the lobby, several cocktail bars and restaurants, so forth and so on. Could one of you hit the lights, please? Thank you.” Brewer turned on an overhead projector that threw a huge diagram of the theater onto one pale cream wall of the apartment, and indicated various parts of it with a pointer. “The main entrance is here, on Hollywood Boulevard, set back from the street. There is a small plaza in front of the main entrance, which is where the long stretch limos all pull up and the big stars do their glamour walk for the television cameras and paparazzi, up the roped-off red carpet and into the building. I’m sure you’ve all seen this on the tube, the men in tuxes and all kinds of outlandish getups, the women wearing designer gowns that cost more than a white working family earns in several years, glittering with jewels and thousand-dollar hair dos.

  “The actual show always starts at 5:30 PM Pacific time, so that East Coast viewers can turn on their TVs at 8:30 and catch the whole show before they have to get to bed so they can get up for work the next morning. The parade of arriving celebrity arrogance starts at about three o’clock in the afternoon, as does the media coverage. This means that the LAPD starts blocking off the streets around the Center at about two thirty, so the stars won’t have to worry about traffic jams and the limos will have plenty of parking. Top celebs and studio executives, etcetera get to have their limos parked along Hollywood Boulevard during the show, so they’ll be readily available afterwards, if the celebs in question decide not to attend the Governor’s Ball, which always follows every awards ceremony. A lot of the losers don’t, because they’re so pissed off they didn’t win an Oscar. The overflow parks in the lot next to the Hollywood Royale hotel, off Highland Avenue, which lot will also have been cleared especially for the occasion. Bear this in mind; it means that from about two o’clock onward, the entire exterior area around the Center for at least three or four blocks around will be crawling with cops, directing traffic and looking out for gate-crashers and the assorted L.A. lowlife which this event always draws like shit draws flies. Once inside the theater building itself, the lobby actually consists of five separate levels. There is a sweeping red-carpeted staircase, with cherry wood balustrades in case anyone is interested, that sweeps up to each level, here. There’s a series of doors, here, here, here and down along here, which lead out onto the balcony seats and also into the private box seats.”

  “Any chance we could gain access to a private box or two?” asked Hill keenly. “They look like they’d make good firing posts.”

  “Tricky,” replied Brewer. “They’re kept locked by the management, and each box holder has a swipe card that admits him and his guests. Not to mention the fact that they’re visible to people in other boxes and up on the catwalk.”

  “Is there some kind of management or security master swipe card our lad in Centurion could get hold of to get us in?” asked Randall.

  “Yes, but there is another problem there. The doors are alarmed and every time they are opened, the opening is recorded in the security control room, along with the identity of the card used,” said Brewer.

  “We need to keep the private boxes in mind as firing positions, though,” said Cat. “I’m looking at these photos you pulled off the internet, and they’d definitely be ideal. Get me and Ron Kolchak into one, or better yet two of them along one side, and we can not only rake the seats but we can pick off the big knobs in the private boxes opposite.”

  “Mr. Ripley, what else is in this lobby area?” asked Lee. “Any service or emergency exit stairs that we could maybe use to get up and over the audience?”

  “The walls of the ground floor of the lobby and the mezzanine as well are covered with backlit glass plaques containing lists of past Oscar winners, niches with assorted Oscar memorabilia, posters from award-winning flicks, etcetera. This is called the Awards Walk. To answer your question, yes, there are access stairs that run the entire height of the building from sub-basement to roof, but they will all be alarmed on the night, and there will be cameras in the stairwells, and needless to say, on the night the lobby is going to be crawling with both uniformed and plainclothes police and security people, as well as completely covered by closed-circuit TV surveillance,” Brewer replied.

  Hill frowned. “Our action won’t be in the lobby, but there will probably be a lot of things going on to distract the guards, drunks and crowds and such, plus they’ll be watching for pickpockets and so on. Where is the security control room and the central camera monitoring point located?”

  “Here, ground floor, down this short corridor off the lobby,” said Brewer, pointing. “The hallway is sealed off from the lobby by a discreet steel door that requires a code to open, but if you want to get in there, there are several access stairwells going up into the corridors above that are used by the security personnel themselves to get around. Most of the camera observation will be on the lobby itself, the plaza outside, and the other entrances such as the side doors and the basement. They won’t be watching the auditorium itself that closely. Remember, they’re looking for lone gatecrashers, mostly. Paparazzi, a whole long list of stalkers to the stars they’ll have photos and files on, so forth and so on.”

  Hill nodded. “I’d like to work out a plan so there is no need for any NVA people ever actually to enter the lobby itself, or to enter or exit through the main entrance. Too many cameras, too many people around, and too many things that might go wrong. Inside the main auditorium will be our kill zone.”

  Brewer nodded. “As you can see in these photographs, the theater itself is laid out as a kind of looped oval structure that looks like a tiara, with sound-reflective ribs running down to the floor all around the chamber to provide for the best possible acoustics. The ceiling is riddled with a spider-web of catwalks and grid work and platforms for spotlights and other lighting, but they’re up quite high and the access to these catwalks is guarded so no weirdos can get up in there and throw stuff down or piss on the audience, which happened once some years ag
o.”

  “If we can neutralize the sentries, could the catwalks be our guys’ firing positions?” asked Christina.

  “That’s mighty high up, Chris. We’d be firing down at too sharp an angle for the best accuracy, almost straight down in some cases, it looks like,” said Lockhart.

  “Plus there would be a problem extracting them from that high a position in all the hullabaloo,” said Hill. “We need to get the shooters down a bit lower and give them a bit flatter angle, not to mention get them a bit closer to the targets and closer to their E & E exits.”

  “Right, one good bit of news regarding the layout in the auditorium,” said Brewer with a satisfied smile. “This should make the job a lot easier. I need to give you a little background first, though. In most prior Oscar ceremonies, the celebrities, in which category I include not only the nominees themselves but the presenters, co-hosts, producers, directors, and a raft of the biggest studio executives, were placed in this smaller auditorium here, behind the main stage.” Brewer pointed on the schematic. “It’s kind of a practice room for the orchestra, and it’s soundproofed. By long tradition, this was called the Green Room, and it was a kind of a waiting room, party room, and cabaret for celebs to hang out in, clown around, schmooze, gossip, etcetera. They’ve got couches and armchairs, the management sets up a bar, and they’ve got big screen TVs to watch the show on. The original idea was that the big shots should be required to spend their big night being gawped at by the unwashed multitudes as little as possible, and should not be required to sit through all the boring preliminaries like Best Foreign Film and Best Animation and Best Documentary and all that. Although the television audience doesn’t see it, in most Oscar ceremonies the big stars and suits and their bejeweled and designer gown bedecked consorts don’t actually come out and sit in their reserved seats on the front row until the Big Five awards come up—Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Also, sometimes Best Supporting Actor and Actress, depending on who’s been nominated, who’s hot that year, who’s spatting with whom and who’s buggering whom, you get the idea.