The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “If you don’t hear from me by the time Best Director starts, then assume I am either dead or captured. Then you go up and out onto the stage from behind the curtain, waste whoever is up there at the podium, then drop down, take what cover you can behind sets or props or whatever, and start blasting away into the VIP section and the private boxes from the stage itself,” Randall told them. “It’s a bloody sloppy way to do this, you’ll have footlights and spotlights in your eyes, and you’ll be all lit up and good targets for the enemy, but if something does go south, I’ll be damned if I am exiting stage left without taking some of these effete Hollywood bastards with me, and I presume that all of you feel the same. If we get trapped, then we go down fighting. I know I don’t have to ask if you’re all up for that. You wouldn’t have been chosen for this mission if you weren’t.”

  “One comment,” said Hill. “I’m sure that at some time all of you must have seen bootleg copies of Braveheart even after it was banned, along with The Passion and all Mel Gibson’s other work. You remember the final scene as the Scottish hero dies crying out Freedom! In that worst-case scenario, if God forbid it should occur, try to make sure as you go down that these Jew motherfuckers hear you shout Freedom! I want them to understand what they’re up against.”

  XXI

  Must-See TV

  It was great pity, so it was,

  This villainous saltpetre should be digged

  Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,

  Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed . . .

  King Henry IV—Act I, Scene 3

  At 8:30 on the morning of the Academy Awards ceremony, Charlie Randall was in the safe apartment the NVA had chosen as the assembly area. He got a call on one of his cell phones from Volunteer Ken Bishop. “Hello, Mr. Dundee? We have the three bags of wallaby feed you ordered. Do you want them delivered?”

  “No, I’ll pick them up meself,” said Randall. “Cheers, mate.” He hung up the phone. “All three boxes are in the hotel,” he told the others around him, all of them casually and nattily dressed in the height of Southern California fashion, down to the cool shades and the Blackberries on their belts. “Right, I will go in first. It will take me about half an hour to get down there, allowing for traffic. As soon as I call in the all clear, the rest of you follow at sixty-minute intervals. You will each be assigned a driver of the opposite sex, who will drop you off a block from the hotel, and from there you will proceed on foot. Lieutenant Ekstrom, make sure they alternate the vehicles each time, so we don’t have just one car or SUV going back and forth. The street CCTV cameras might pick that up and someone at police headquarters might notice the same vehicle going in and out of the area. If you see anything, anything at all, that looks or feels wrong on the way in, abort your entry and let Oscar know immediately. He will contact me. Do not attempt to contact me yourselves until you are in the hotel suite.”

  “I’ll be your driver, sir,” spoke up Volunteer Jeannie Holdstoft. “You’re in luck. It’s a nice sunny day and since you’re the CO, you rate the Jag, so we can go with the top down.”

  Half an hour later Randall eased into the Royale with a camera slung over his neck and a press identification badge from a major Australian newspaper dangling to his lapel. The lobby was crowded with milling people, tourists, movie flacks and publicists, bellhops and hotel employees, media and fans. He had no difficulty in strolling into an elevator and making it to the fourteenth floor. He checked the security cameras in the hall to make sure the little red light was off, and then knocked three times quickly on the door of 1401 and then twice, more slowly. Erica Collingwood opened the door. She was wearing a dark brown leather skirt, sandals, and a white silk blouse with several top buttons undone. Randall stepped inside, and without saying anything to her he walked through the four-room suite and kitchenette, holding his electronic bug-sweeper high. The suite showed clean. Three large cardboard cases lay on the floor in one corner. Randall went over to one of them, opened it with a pocket knife, and while Erica watched in fascination he drew out a Ruger .22 automatic and a silencer, which he screwed onto the muzzle of the pistol, and then an interior clip holster, which he slipped onto his belt at the small of his back, holstering the gun and pulling his shirttail over it. He then opened his cell phone and dialed. Christina Ekstrom answered. “Thank you for calling the Los Angeles County Humane Society,” she said politely. “How may I direct your call?”

  “Do you have any wombats?” asked Randall. “I’m looking to adopt about three of them.”

  “Uh, no, sir, I’m afraid we don’t have any wombats at the moment,” said Christina. “Could I interest you in a nice Cat? We have one here who is looking for a good home.”

  “Is he litter-trained?” asked Randall. Christina couldn’t resist giggling. Randall hung up. “Right. I just confirmed I’m here safe, and all three boxes are here. The next man is on his way. How did it go this morning?”

  “My performance was a success,” said Erica, suddenly remembering to button up her blouse. “I was right. Those spics and the one white guy had their minds on me and their eyes glued to my rack. We could have brought in a couple of tanks, and they wouldn’t have noticed.”

  “I didn’t have to go through any metal detectors on my way in,” said Randall. “Crikey, that’s a change from Seattle or Portland! Up there you have to go through a metal detector and a couple of checkpoints every time you go to the bog in a first class hotel like this. We’ve pulled off too many naughties in such places. How are you holding up, Erica?”

  “More nervous than even when I did my first serious screen test at age twelve, but don’t worry, it’s just stage fright,” she assured him. “I won’t flake on you. I’m up for this, all the way.”

  “Good on yez,” said Randall.

  “Now what?” asked Erica.

  “We wait. The next man should be here in about an hour. The whole team should be in by mid-afternoon. Anything going on here I need to know about? I didn’t see any drunken movie stars in the corridor.”

  “Oh, none of the real heavies ever get up much before noon,” said Erica.

  “You’re up,” said Randall.

  “Yeah, well, I had to go on at eight, remember?” she said with a smile. “You ever want to become an actor, the key to winning any director’s heart is when you’ve got a six o’clock call, you’re there at six, in makeup, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to go dramatic on his ass. I’ve gotten parts before, edged out a lot bigger named actresses than me, purely because I take my craft seriously. The directors know that when I’m on set I’m all business, and I make those six o’clock calls, sober, straight, not groggy or hung over, and ready to roll camera.”

  “Someday you’ll be the biggest star in the Homeland,” Randall promised.

  “Will we win?” she asked him bluntly.

  “We’ve got a fighting chance, yes,” he told her. “We could still blow it. It could all come unglued. They can’t defeat us, although we might yet defeat ourselves with some stupid mistake. But the United States will never be the same. No matter what happens to us, tonight or from now on, we have written indelibly into the history books that at least some white men finally revolted after a century of oppression and insult, and that our race did not go gentle into that good night. We’ve shattered so many politically correct myths over the past two years I can’t even count ’em. And I’ll tell you this much, Erica. We may not have the power to remake the world in our image, or even to grab back the small part of it we’re demanding of these bastards. But we can make bloody well sure they can’t create their Brave New World either, that big consumer plantation where a small gang of Jews and science nerds and white poofters in business suits sit on the veranda and sip their mint juleps, fucking everything that moves and grazing in the grass, while all the rest of the world consists of coffee-colored peons toiling in their factories and offices, spending their minimum wage on junk food and bright shiny trashy little toys and worshipping Ronald McDonald,
with no race, no culture, no God, no identity, nothing to live and die for except bloody money and mindless recreation. If it can’t be the white man’s world ever again, by God, it will never belong to the Jews!” He saw she was looking at him strangely. “Sorry. Got up on me soapbox there for a bit.”

  “No, I’m riveted, actually,” she said earnestly. “Look, Mr. Dundee, or Mick, or whatever your name really is, I have to admit, all this is a bit freaky for me, but not in a bad way. I was listening to you just then, and all of a sudden it hit me that in all my life, I’ve never known a man, a real man, of my own race.”

  “What about Chase?” he asked her.

  “Chase was everything that a modern feminist would want in a partner,” said Erica. “Jesus! You hear, I just said partner and not husband. I guess that shows how deep all this PC social engineering and mental conditioning goes.”

  “It’s just like George Orwell wrote in 1984,” agreed Randall. “By controlling the language, they eventually control thought. I’ll try to counteract it a bit by addressing you as Miss Collingwood.”

  “Thanks, but Erica’s good,” she laughed. “Chase was kind, and gentle, and supportive, and creative, and funny, and a great kisser, among other things.”

  “Those aren’t at all bad qualities for a man to have, you know,” Randall reminded her gently. “Sounds to me like you could have done a lot worse.”

  “Yes, I know, but that’s all he was,” said Erica. “It’s like that with so many otherwise fine white males today. It’s like half of them is missing. The hard half, the strong half, that once led our race to conquer almost all the world, to make the world the way it is today. The strength, the courage, the ruggedness, the will to power and to overcome obstacles that our people once had is gone now.”

  “The Old Man calls it the alpha gene,” said Randall.

  “Yeah, well, it seems to have gone missing in white males these days. If it’s there at all, it’s there in some weird, mutated form like obsessive and heartless ambition and clawing for money, or else it shows up in sudden psychotic episodes that always catch you by surprise just when you think you know a guy. For the rest of us, it’s like we’ve just given up and accepted our own end. You’d be amazed how many white people of my acquaintance simply take it as a matter of course, as an irreversible fact of life, that the white race is going to become extinct in a generation or two, and that we’re all going to become coffee-colored, like you said just now when you were on your soap box. Chase had everything I could ever want in a man, except that,” she said mournfully. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved him and I love him still. But now it’s kind of hitting me for the first time that I was only settling, because I knew he would be the best I could ever do from the available field of choice. I didn’t know there were any of you older models still in service,” she added with a rueful smile.

  “Yeah, a few,” Randall replied, grinning. “Kinda hard to get parts, though.”

  “I suppose this is the cue for me to go all slinky and ask you how long we’ve got until that next Volunteer knocks on the door?” she said, trying to laugh it off.

  “Best offer I’ve had all day,” said the Australian gallantly. “But even if you were serious, I couldn’t take you up on it. Business before pleasure, and all that.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” she said with a nod. “But look, if we both make it through and it turns out to be possible, you’ve got my number and you know where I live.”

  “Invitation accepted. I’d really like to get to know a girl who reads Henry Lawson better,” said Randall, and she could tell that he meant it. “You may consider yourself on my to-do list.” She giggled. “Now, you’ve got cable in here, right? I need to keep it on the local news channels, see if there’s anything brewing Oscar-wise or all around the town that might affect us, although Mr. Ripley tells us that so far everything is going as planned. When do you have to show up for the penthouse bash?”

  “Not until about one,” she said. “I need to go up and help Janie and the caterers get set up. I’ll need to come down here about four thirty and change into my Prada threads.”

  “The lads have already been told that you don’t exist,” said Randall. “You can trust them to protect your identity as much as is possible from anyone in a situation like this.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Erica. “I meant it when I told you, I want my name in the hat along with all of you. It’s an honor.”

  An hour later came the secret knock on the door. Randall looked out the peephole, saw Cat-Eyes Lockhart outside, and opened it to let him in. Lockhart was wearing a false moustache, sunglasses, and a baseball cap, hopefully to fool any facial profiling software that might pick him up on camera. He peeled off the moustache and took off the hat as they went into the living room of the suite. “Damned thing itches. So this is how the other half lives!” said Lockhart with an appreciative whistle. “Snazzy.” Erica got up from the sofa. Lockhart was startled. “Well, I’ll be damned, you’re . . .”

  “She’s no one,” said Randall. “She’s not here, remember?”

  “Now that’s a real pity,” said Lockhart, shaking his head admiringly. “Sorry, ma’am. I’m a bit star-struck, but I guess you’re used to that.”

  “I’m the one who should be star-struck, Mr. Lockhart,” said Erica, shaking his hand in some awe. “I think your face has been getting more air time than mine for the past year. My God, how can you walk around in public with the whole world after you?”

  “You’re an actor, so you should know the answer to that,” said Lockhart. “You just school yourself to understand that you’re on stage all the time, twenty-four seven. You assume a character and you live it, and you never let yourself forget the role you’re playing. Everyone you meet on the street or in this hotel or anywhere else is your audience, and if your performance slips just once, you’re done for. Death is the ultimate bad review.”

  “Wow, talk about total immersion!” said Erica, shaking her head in wonder.

  “You’re going to be playing that role yourself, from now on,” Randall reminded her.

  “Jeez, you know, you’re right!” Erica acknowledged.

  “Starting tonight,” said Lockhart. “Ma’am . . .”

  “Erica,” she said.

  “Okay, Erica, as I understand it from my briefing, you’re going to be presenting the Best Screenplay award to those two faggots?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she confirmed. “I hope you’re as good a shot as your reputation claims, Mr. Lockhart.”

  “Might as well call me Cat-Eyes, or just Cat,” said Lockhart. “Everyone else does, including that asshole on Fox News who added a hundred thousand dollars of his own personal money to my DT bounty. Look, I know this is kind of late in the day, but do you understand that you might be hit yourself? We’ll be firing without our usual telescopic sights, because we don’t have any way to re-zero and adjust them after breaking the weapons down and putting them back together. Ron and I are both good at what we do, but in that kind of confined space with all the noise and confusion, anything could happen. It’s going to be a slaughterhouse down there,” he concluded bluntly.

  “She understands that,” said Randall. “This is why all six of you have to see her, and know her for one of us, to make sure no one takes her for just another dumb Hollywood blonde and decides to add her to his bag. After which you delete that file from your memories.”

  “Ten-four, sir. But one thing, Erica. I’ve got first shot. When those two fruits get up on stage, and they’re standing at the podium together, make sure you quietly step back a couple of paces. Give me a little wiggle room to play with.”

  “Not a good idea,” she said, shaking her head. “You obviously don’t know how the Tinsel Town mentality works, lucky guy. In Hollywood, shrinking violets finish last. We always try to upstage one another any time there’s a camera rolling or any media around. It’s so much part of the mindset in this town that any deviation from that pattern will look suspicious. I d
on’t know if you’ve ever actually watched the Oscars, but if you have, you’ll recall that the presenters always try to grab as much face time on camera as they can. After they’ve opened the envelope and the winner or winners are up on stage, the presenters always try to stay in the shot, even if they’re just hovering in the background. Sometimes they even mug the winners behind their backs, much to the studios’ displeasure, but it’s become kind of an accepted thing. If I step back from Nat and Marty while they’re making their acceptance speech, far enough to be out of your line of fire, then about the fortieth time the FBI and the DHS replay that tape, one of their psychologists or profilers is going to notice the fact that I stepped out of the way, and they’re going to wonder why.” She took his hand. “You’re supposed to be the greatest rifleman in the world, Cat. Be that. I trust you with my life.”

  “Uh, okay,” said Lockhart, still somewhat dubious. “Well, I hope so, because the other sniper and me are going to be using special ammunition, something our quartermaster’s father cooked up for us. All lead slugs, no copper jackets since at this range we won’t need them for ballistics, hollow points with mercury fulminate caps and an extra hot load. That soft lead will pancake and the cap will explode when the round strikes, and each shot will blow holes in people the size of a phone book.”

  “Thanks for the visual,” she said wryly.

  “Now, I’ve got another question, uh . . .” Lockhart looked at Randall and nodded almost imperceptibly toward Erica, arching his eyebrows in question.

  “Mick Dundee, in present company,” Randall told him.

  “Okay, Mick. In view of the ongoing nature of our mission here, do I, or you, or both of us card this tickle? God, I’d love to!”

  “Naturally, since it will probably go down in history as your masterpiece,” laughed Randall. “I don’t think either of us could possibly be more wanted by ZOG than we are already. A hit this big, you’re the first one they’re going to accuse anyway. Me they don’t know from Adam’s house cat, which is as it should be, but they bloody well know the Prince of Wands. Hell, let the kikes know that the Volunteers have sent down their A team. With tonight’s festivities as an opening number, that will rattle them even more. Sure, let’s both card ’em.”