The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  With a foreign foe at our harbour gate

  And a blazing drought behind!”

  “Hard to believe that was written well over a century ago,” Randall sighed. “Lawson had it too right, mate. Not knocking the Northwest Homeland, but it’s my own land I’d be fighting for if our people had listened to Lawson, or even possessed two brain cells to rub together.”

  “We win here, we’ll win elsewhere later on,” Hill assured him. “But we have to win somewhere first, to capture some patch of land where we can raise a couple of generations of white kids in cleanliness and sanity and knowledge of who they are. The first battle always had to be here, I think, right in the belly of the Beast.”

  The young woman went back into the kitchen, poured her own tea and came back out with the teacup in one hand and the second coffee in the other, which she handed to Brewer. “Barry likes his black, but do you want cream or sugar, Mister . . . ?”

  “You can call me Oscar,” said Hill. “And this is, ah . . .” He suddenly remembered he didn’t know what name Randall wanted to use for this contact.

  “Mick Dundee,” said the Australian cheerily.

  “You’re Crocodile Dundee, huh?” said the actress, with a quick sidelong glance and a wry downturn of her mouth. That quirky little facial expression had driven millions of adolescent boys into a lovesick frenzy for four years when, in her teens, she had played the eldest daughter in a television sitcom that was insipid even by Fox Network standards, but which had been carried to the top ratings every year by her beauty, skill and camera presence alone.

  “I occasionally morph into the Mad Max Road Warrior,” Randall admitted. “When I’m not reciting poetry.”

  “Jesus, I’ll bet you really do, don’t you?” she asked softly, staring at him. “Wow! Sorry, but you guys are the first other, uh, well, the first other ones I’ve met besides Barry.”

  “I’m not sure Erica really believed until now there were any others,” said Brewer.

  “Oh, the TV occasionally reminds me.” Then she looked at Hill. “What did you decide on the cream and sugar?”

  “Black’s fine with me, ma’am,” said Hill.

  They sat down. Erica Collingwood curled up on the sofa and looked at Brewer. “I gather something important has come up?” she said, sipping her herbal tea.

  “Yes,” said Brewer. “Erica has been of great help to me by way of collecting and passing on information,” he told the other two. “There are some things that can be learned only by someone who has access to the creative as opposed to the purely business side of the industry, and someone who has entrée into every part of every studio, which I don’t have. Erica doesn’t have mega-star status, by any means, but she is sufficiently famous so that she can pretty much go anywhere in Hollywood and no one questions her presence there.” He turned to her. “Now we need your help for what we term active service, Erica. I am sure you know what that means. You must have known that this day would come. I am going to ask you straight out whether you are willing to help us in a specific operation, which I warn you could lead to your own exposure and your own destruction. I need you to decide right now how deep into this you want to get.”

  “You want me to help you actually kill people,” she stated calmly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Hill.

  “It’s Erica, not ma’am,” she replied. “Suppose I do want to back out? What are you going to do, kill me?” She sounded as if she found the possibility mildly interesting, but not in any way threatening or fearful.

  “No,” said Hill. “We’re not gangsters. You’ve proven to be a friend of ours, and we don’t kill our friends if they feel they can’t do us a favor. You’re not an actual Volunteer, you’re what we call an asset, and that means that you have at least some choice as to how deep your involvement becomes. We’ve found it’s better to evaluate people as assets for as long a time as possible before actually bringing them into the Army and placing them under military discipline. We have to make sure that every Volunteer is fully committed, and is willing to carry out any task assigned to them before we place them on active service.”

  “If you say no, Erica, then we’ll walk out of here and you will never hear from these gentlemen again, or me,” said Brewer. “You’ll have to find another agent, of course, but I’m not worried about your ratting me out. I trust your personal honor and integrity.” This was frankly bullshit. They had already settled in the car that if Erica Collingwood did panic or go neurotic on them, Brewer and his operation would have to be shut down and the Hollywood agent would have to disappear for an extended vacation in an unknown location, but the prize was big enough to justify that risk.

  Her reply was calm. “I’ve been wondering when you would ask me something like this, Barry, and for a time I wondered what my answer would be. I went to see Chase last week, and when I left, I knew. The answer is yes. I will do whatever you want me to do.”

  “Including help us to kill a lot of people, some of whom for all we know may be your friends?” asked Charlie.

  “I don’t have any friends in this town who are likely to be on any hit list you guys have drawn up,” she replied. “I long ago learned it’s not a good idea to get too down with people who are in the same business I am, because they really are gangsters, morally if not of the machine gun in the violin case kind. If the Beautiful People think you might be standing in their way for anything they want, or sometimes just out of plain nutty malice, your so-called best friends will knife you in the back in a heartbeat. I am ready to do whatever you need done.”

  “Why?” asked Randall bluntly. “You seem to have everything this society has to offer. Why would you bite the hand that feeds you?”

  “You want Speech A, B, C, or D?” asked Erica. “I could tell you how I am sick and tired of seeing people of my skin color, and especially women of my hair and skin color, degraded and insulted and humiliated and turned into figures of fun or mindless sex objects, or Barbie doll megaphones spouting politically correct drivel, in every movie and every TV show that comes out of this toilet. I could tell you that I have reached the point where I have had it with being kept forever in the second rank of actresses, denied the kind of major film roles and creative opportunities that my talent and abilities damned well entitle me to, because I refuse to perform assorted sexual perversions on the bodies of the Jews who wield the power in Hollywood like a good shiksa is supposed to. I could tell you how I refuse to live any longer in fear, hiding behind a cordon of barred windows and locks and security systems, locked into the upscale parts of town where there’s still some police and private security presence, quietly terrified every time I set foot on the street anywhere in Los Angeles because I’m white and female and a target for any black or brown mugger or rapist or killer who decides he wants to get him some white meat tonight. I could tell you how I spent my childhood in Seattle and I am really enthralled at the idea of what the city could be like when all the Vietnamese gangs and the Mexicans and the nigger crack addicts are cleared out of it. And all of those things would be true, as far as they went.”

  “Who’s Chase?” asked Randall.

  “My real reason for being involved with you,” she said with a sigh, looking up at them. “This is going to sound like melodrama straight off the afternoon soaps, but Chase Clayburn is the only man I have ever truly loved.”

  “Chase Clayburn the actor?” asked Hill. “Yes, ma’am, sorry, Erica. I know what happened to him. It was in the media.”

  “But you don’t know how it happened,” said Erica steadily. “Two years ago, I was up for the female lead in the Arthur Bernstein film version of The Clintons. I was going to play Hillary, believe it or not. They wanted a younger actress because the script started when she was younger than I am, and it’s hell of a lot easier to age a young actress than make one Hillary’s age look twenty-three again. The makeup artists would age me through the film until I looked like the hag she is now as President. They were even going to put in the controve
rsial bit where she gets her ear cut off by the Mafia, which she has always denied.”

  “My boss at Third Section actually has an interesting story to tell about that,” chuckled Hill. “He was there when it happened.” [See Slow Coming Dark, by the same author.]

  “Really?” asked Brewer curiously.

  “So he says,” said Hill. “But go on please, Erica.”

  “I had just announced my engagement to Chase, we were living together in this apartment and everything was really great between us, and I was just about to get the biggest part of my life. My then agent, Manny Skar, tells me I have Hillary nailed down. I go in for the final interview with Sid Glick and Arthur Bernstein, the director. It’s supposed to be a working script review and concept session with the producer, director, and other lead cast members. I get up to the office at Paradigm and I don’t see anybody else there. Then Manny shows up, and I get clued in on the one final little requirement for me to get the part. I think you can guess what it was.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Randall concurred in a sour, angry voice.

  “What got me was the casual way Manny Skar brought it up, like it was no big deal, and he assumed the knowledge on my part that in Hollywood it really wasn’t a big deal, that it happens all the time,” Erica went on. She waved her hands vaguely, almost stifled by rage at the memory. “He told me that it had been brought to Sid and Arthur’s attention that I hadn’t paid my dues yet. Those were his very words, and that’s the term that’s most often used for this kind of transaction in Hollywood. It was just the way Manny was telling me all this, like it was some kind of routine legal or financial clause in a contract he was explaining to me. He simply assumed that I knew the score, which I admit I did, and now that my turn had come I would go ahead and go into that office, let Sid and Arthur lock the door, prostitute myself to those two kikes in whatever kinky way they had in mind, and then we’d all go on with the picture as if nothing had happened.”

  “Let me guess,” said Hill sympathetically. “You blew up in a rage and you used the forbidden J word?”

  “Oh, no,” said Erica, shaking her head. “I didn’t lose it that bad! If I had used the J word I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t even be doing dinner theater in Scottsdale, Arizona for audiences of dribbling retirees. I’d be back in Seattle working in an insurance company cubicle, if I was lucky, and a Laundromat if I wasn’t. I kept my head. I simply explained to Manny calmly and with poise, that I was engaged to be married and I didn’t feel it was appropriate to deceive my fiancé even as a matter of business, and I was sure that Mr. Glick and Mr. Bernstein would be able to find someone who could play the role of Hillary Clinton as well as I could. All very frigidly polite, but I know Manny picked up on the hostile vibe. Then I walked out. I knew Hillary was gone for me, but I crossed my fingers and hoped they wouldn’t be pissed off enough to retaliate further. Boy, did I get that one wrong!” She shook her head sadly. “Well, Lana Palomo won Best Actress at last year’s Oscars for her portrayal of Hillary, and as a punishment for my uppity refusal to let him use me like a whore, Sid Glick made a phone call to a contact of his in Washington, D.C. Chase’s draft exemption was revoked ten days later, by order of none other than President Hillary Clinton, just in case I missed the point Sid was trying to make. Chase thought it was a mistake of some kind, until three days after that, when his induction notice arrived, hand-delivered by two MPs to make sure he reported immediately to Fort Lewis for basic training. The shortened three-week cannon fodder version, of course. This man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with was literally dragged out of my arms, here in this room, and shanghaied off to Iran in a matter of weeks, and not one lawyer I spoke with would touch the case with a ten-foot pole. The word was out. You know what happened after that.”

  “I remember what the TV news said,” said Hill with a nod. “IED on his first patrol in Shiraz, I believe?”

  “Yes. Two other soldiers were killed, and Chase came back home a paraplegic. He exists in a mechanical wheelchair with a respirator operating his lungs, in a hundred-year-old VA hospital that is like something out of an opium-eater’s nightmare. I keep trying to buy him out of there and get him into a real hospital, but the word is still out and they keep citing all kinds of arcane military regulations to keep him in VA. He can barely talk. Every time I go to see him in that little piece of hell, he begs me not to come again, not to look at him like that, and I promise him I won’t, but I always go again anyway.” She looked up at them, her eyes glistening with tears. “You asked me why I am willing to help the NVA, Mr. Dundee. It’s not that I don’t believe in what you’re doing. I do. I’m a Northwesterner myself and I want to see it a free and clean and white country. I have seen this filthy world from the top, and I know better than most that it has to die if humanity is to live. But mostly it’s just plain revenge. Those Jew bastards hurt me so badly I want to die, and I don’t care if I do die, so long as I make them suffer beforehand.”

  “Thank you for telling us this, Erica,” said Hill.

  “And for the record, love, there ain’t a bloody thing wrong with revenge!” said Charlie. “Crikey, revenge is one of the NVA’s best selling points! We’re the only outfit around that deals in revenge for white people. It’s a major recruiting incentive.”

  “What do you want me to do, Barry?” she said, wiping her eyes and turning to Brewer, all business again.

  “We need you to get in with that party hearty crowd who are renting the top floors of the Hollywood Royale for the Awards ceremony,” said Brewer. “We need you to get your own private party suite. Everyone will take it that you’re signaling that your days of mourning for Chase are over, and you want to indulge in a nice earthy little pre-Awards orgy of your own. We need you to get the electronic key cards to every door in the hotel you can get, every elevator, and also to the Trap Door that leads into the Kodak Theater. We have a machine that will copy them, and so when the cops and feds come looking for the originals, they’ll still be in your purse. Then we need you to get seven Northwest Volunteers into the hotel, with their weapons and equipment. On the night we need you to get them into the Kodak via the Trap Door, and possibly help with their escape.”

  “My God!” she breathed, stunned. “You’re going to hit the Oscars!”

  “You might say we’re going to give them the red carpet treatment,” said Randall with a low chuckle. “All their carpets will be red after we’re done.”

  “People are going to die, and you are going to be responsible,” said Hill. “You might die as well, from bullets on the night or lying on a gurney with a needle in some secret Homeland Security prison. Yes or no, Erica? Last chance.”

  “I’m in,” she said. “You’re going to cut this town’s heart out, and I want to be part of it!”

  “Got it in one,” agreed Randall.

  “Thank you, comrade,” said Hill.

  “So can you do it?” asked Brewer.

  “Yeah, I think so. I was yakking with Jane Gerasimo about that very thing this morning on the phone, and she tells me both floors are booked solid by the usual brie and buggery crowd of celebs, but maybe I could get a suite one floor below that, if I call up and really schmooze the manager!” said Erica excitedly.

  “That would be even better, more out of sight and out of mind, but you let me do the schmoozing,” said Brewer. “I’m your agent, remember? That’s what you pay me for. I’m supposed to handle your indiscretions as well as your career, and it will look unusual if you make the arrangements yourself and not me. I’ll check you in the day before, and cop the key cards for the room and the elevator for you, but the Trap Door isn’t officially supposed to exist, and you’ll have to get that one for us. If Janey doesn’t have one you can borrow, you’ll have to get hold of one somewhere else. I understand a couple of C-notes to the maître d’ are customary.”

  “When and how should we enter the hotel?” asked Charlie. “What’s their security like?”

  “Let’s take a look,” said Br
ewer, opening his briefcase and pulling out his copy of the Centurion Security operations documents. “Centurion has the Royale contract as well, and as soon as I thought about the Trap Door as a point of entry I had our guy pull the plans for that one as well. It’s normally tight, and it will be tighter on Oscar night, with all those glitterati around, as you can see,” said Brewer, pointing out the relevant pages to them. “Roving rent-a-cops and house dicks, closed circuit TV cameras on the entrances and in all the hallways, of course, and in the elevators. Plus there will be all the party hearty crew themselves running around the corridors. The entrance to the Trap Door on the hotel side is in the laundry room in the sub-basement, here. That’s the point where the team will have to converge. From the laundry room there is a door leading directly out into the underground garage, for your exit. On the up side, no sniffer dogs on duty in the hotel. I’m sure the management doesn’t want to embarrass some of Hollywood’s biggest stars by being barked and pawed at by rude hounds who smell the party favors in their handbags and their suitcases.”

  “How the hell are we supposed to move around in there with cameras everywhere?” asked Randall in exasperation. “Once we get in and hole up somewhere, in this lady’s hotel suite or wherever, how do we get down to the entrance to this Trap Door with our weapons? And then get back out again after we present our own Best Dead Jew awards? Not to mention the fact that the cameras will record our faces for the FBI and Homeland Security later on?”

  “Mmmm, simple,” said Erica. “You wear masks! No, don’t look at me like that, I’m serious! Look, Janey Gerasimo went the other party planners one better. She and her father, Charlton Bates the director, rented the penthouse, the Presidential Suite, and she was badgering me to spend the whole two days there. She’s been my self-appointed bestest buddy ever since Chase was crippled. She and Chase were an item before I came on the scene. We’re supposed to be sharing our grief and all that crap. Actually, I think she just wants to watch me suffer and twist the knife when she can. Suppose I can talk her into throwing a two-day costume party in the Presidential Suite? Then there will be all kinds of people wandering up and down the halls in various stages of drunk and stoned and stupid, and all wearing masks!”