The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “It’s a big city,” said Hill. “Nonetheless, better to be safe than sorry. I think we need to jump into hyperspace.”

  “What?”

  “I have a whole second string of safe houses, apartments, and storage facilities lined up for Task Force Director’s Cut,” said Barry Brewer. “The lieutenant means we move everything, just in case someone got careless or some nosy neighbor has gotten curious about the new folks next door.”

  “Once we all get settled into our new digs, we go out again and we start taking down individual targets,” said Hill firmly. “Remember the first rule of the NVA, gentlemen. They don’t hunt us. We hunt them, always. We need to keep on hitting them and hitting them, keeping them off balance.”

  The task force accomplished the relocation into their new quarters that night, executing the movement in separate vehicles and at staggered intervals. The next day they resumed offensive operations, and any hopes that Hollywood entertained that the Oscar Night Massacre was a once-off and the killers had receded back into the Northwest mists was shattered. Australian actor Hugh Lewis, who had made an infamous homosexual Western showing cowboys engaging in sodomy out on the lone prairie, was shot down in the checkout line of a fashionable organic fruit and food market in Brentwood. Charlie Randall had asked for and received that assignment, and he carried it out personally. “Salvaging the national honor of Australia,” he called it. That evening Paramount Pictures’ chief financial officer David Rapaport was killed by a single sniper’s round as he cavorted in the swimming pool of his Laurel Canyon mansion with two naked starlets, one of whom fled screaming and was cut down on the patio by a second bullet. The second girl had sense enough to hold her breath and dive underwater at the deep end of the pool, coming up for breaths of air at one corner where it was difficult for Lockhart to hit her, because from his firing position on a hill behind the house the diving board was in the way, so he let her go and beat feet.

  Oscar Night had stunned and paralyzed the film community, but the screaming headlines and jabbering cable news coverage on the morning after these latest killings started the real panic. Movie stars and B actors, rappers and rock stars, television personalities and newscasters, studio moguls, directors and producers, screenwriters, executives and attorneys, and all manner of lesser fry began to flee the city. Some of the glitterati created elaborate cover stories about shooting on location or vital assignments elsewhere, feeding these fabrications to the media via their publicists, but most of them just plain cut and ran. Whole entourages fled in helicopters and private jets, in limousines, in airport taxis, in tour buses, and in fleets of private cars. They fled to New York City, to Florida, to posh watering holes in Hawaii and the Caribbean, and to foreign countries. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” Brewer reported back. “Hollywood has become a ghost town in a week! Most of the major enemy assets on our hit list are gone now, scattered all across hell’s creation. You guys may run out of targets.”

  “Oh, they’ll be back,” said Hill with a shrug. “The Burger Kings can keep the Dream Machine running by remote control to some degree, for a while, by phone and e-mail and video-conferencing. But almost all their plant and facilities, their sound studios and technical stuff, their money, their whole infrastructure is centered here. Not to mention their homes and their lifestyles and all the luxuries they’ve grown accustomed to. They’ll have to sneak back at least intermittently to mind the store. When they do, we’ll be waiting for them.”

  It was true. The NVA was light and mobile; the century-and-a-quarter old Jewish power structure in Hollywood was not, and given the insatiable demand of the American public for entertainment and the equally insatiable demand of the industry for mega-profits, the Dream Machine had to keep on functioning and churning out the schmaltz and the sleaze. That meant that somehow, terrified actors and directors and crew had to be enticed into staying on the job. Multi-million dollar pictures in mid-production couldn’t be just dropped. Television series couldn’t get by on last year’s re-runs forever; new episodes had to be made and aired. Variety shows, reality shows, game shows that were filmed in front of live studio audiences had to continue taping, in itself a security nightmare since now every audience member had to be given a full security background check and examined from head to toe before he or she took their seat. The producers of these shows got around this by assembling several fully screened audiences of between two and five hundred people who were bused in armored transport from studio to studio, these spectators being paid $200 per show. Since there were often three or four shows taping per day, some of these professional audience members did quite well for themselves simply by sitting in chairs and laughing and applauding when the teleprompter told them to. One man told a news interviewer “The NVA is putting my kid through college.”

  “We’re hitting the bastards hard, where it hurts,” said Hill. “In their wallets.” The LAPD and a massive FBI task force were practically tearing the entire greater Los Angeles area apart brick by brick looking for the NVA gunmen. The almost empty streets of the wealthy suburbs where the Beautiful People lived and the movie business suburbs like Hollywood and Burbank and Culver City were crawling with police units and FBI undercover cars, private security patrols by heavily armed “contractors,” and battered vehicles containing would-be bounty hunters with nothing but a gun and a dream, some of whom ended up in slapstick shootouts with law enforcement teams who mistook them for NVA.

  But the members of Task Force Director’s Cut became adept at disguise and masters of the immediate bug-out at any sign that the police or federals were getting close, while Brewer and Christina Ekstrom made sure they always had someplace to bug out to. Ironically, Operation We Are Not Amused had so badly stampeded the Hollywood élite that there was an immediate demand for house sitters, and Barry Brewer was able diffidently to offer a solution. He made a couple of calls. “Tina, darling! Hey, look, I heard you were going out of town for a while, and you need somebody to look after your place in Santa Monica. Look, I’ve got a couple of my kids, bit players, and what with all this violent racist crap going down and production lots grinding to a halt all over town, they’re getting called even less than usual and they can use the shekels, not to mention saving on rent. No, they’re professionals and they really respect your talent and your work, they won’t trash the place or throw dope parties or anything like that, I can promise you. Sure, I’ll send them over and they can talk to your assistant. Hey, when all this shit is over and things get back to normal, we need to do lunch sometime!” The result was that in a number of cases, wealthy Jewish executives and famous movie stars ended up providing room and board in L.A.’s poshest suburbs to the very NVA gunmen from whom they were fleeing in terror, and paying them a salary to boot.

  The hits continued, despite the paucity of targets:

  * MGM vice president Izzy Sapirstein entered his locked and security-alarmed garage one morning, turned the key in the ignition of his Porsche, and both Jew and Porsche were blown through the garage roof, courtesy of Vincent Pascarella and his team.

  * Rapper Booga Booga B and two of his bodyguards were cut down by automatic weapons fire in front of a trendy Compton night club.

  * A massive car bomb was smuggled onto the Dreamworks-Disney back lot and leveled an entire Santa’s Village set, totally derailing a major Christmas movie and costing DW-D about 40 million dollars in losses.

  * Television director Mort Lerner was found dead on the floor of a private lap-dance room in a Laguna Beach strip club with his throat cut; the police could get only a vague description of a young woman with tattoos whom no one remembered seeing around before.

  * Television screenwriter and producer David Wilder was found behind the wheel of his Lexus in a Burlingame parking lot, his skull full of .22 LR hollow points.

  * Foul-mouthed standup comic Marta Moskowitz, whose shtick consisted almost entirely of obscenities, references to excrement and snooty flaunting of her Jewish heritage, was found tied with duct tape
to a chair in her apartment’s kitchen, strangled with a garrote, and a bar of soap jammed into her mouth.

  * On slow days the crew kept their hand in by doing drive-bys at every studio entrance and office building, and simply shooting any non-white they saw going in or out. These institutions developed severe problems getting their mail, their courier packages, and their pizzas delivered. Their cafeterias shut down and their wastebaskets piled up because the Mexican staff members were too afraid to come to work.

  * He-man actor Bruce Willard postured and posed for the media, metaphorically beating his hairy chest, swearing no redneck racist sons of bitches were going to run him out of town. It wasn’t a redneck racist who nailed Willard, though, it was a perky little blonde girl dressed as a waitress in his favorite downtown bistro who handed him a menu, gushingly asked for and received the actor’s autograph on a napkin, and then fired three .38 Special Black Talon rounds into his chest and a fourth into his skull, leaving Willard lying dead face down in a bowl of gazpacho. Thus did Lieutenant Christina Ekstrom finally make her bones.

  Within thirty days, the Northwest Volunteer Army had effectively shut down the entire American movie-making industry and over half of the television production. Studio budgets were snapping like sticks. Ratings were in the toilet because the whole country was glued 24/7 to the cable news waiting to see which Hollywood celebrity was next on the hit parade, in a runaway reality show from hell. Las Vegas and Indian casino bookmakers were doing a gold rush business giving odds on which of the Beautiful People would end up on a slab, and when. For the first time in living memory, the major entertainment conglomerates were measuring their monthly incomes in mere millions of dollars instead of billions. Something had to be done.

  Arnold Blaustein was the first to return to Tinsel Town, where in conjunction with his Israeli security specialists he created what amounted to his own private Green Zone on the Paradigm Studios lot. It was an office building surrounded by Bremer walls, sandbags, and razor wire, every square inch monitored by CCTV and patrolled in force by gorilla-faced “contractors” with dogs and M-16s, commanded by former Israeli army officers. The windows were all replaced by bulletproof and bombproof glass, the air-conditioning was sealed off from all outside access via a completely closed circulation system involving oxygen tanks and filters that now took up a whole basement, and there were anti-aircraft guns mounted on the roof that boasted the first ever BATFE permits for privately owned artillery pieces. Another floor held comfortable if not luxurious living quarters, showers, a sauna, a cafeteria and a cocktail lounge. Getting this fortress built and operational inside three weeks had cost the studio a cool billion dollars and change; Blaustein had signed the checks without a murmur. This monstrosity was called the SOC, Secure Operations Center. Hollywood immediately dubbed it “the Bunker,” and some daring wits even called it the “Führerbunker,” although after several loose-lipped Paradigm employees were fired for being overheard using the term, it was only whispered. It was this building that became the command post for Hollywood’s counterattack against the NVA.

  The complex contained a plush conference room with a long mahogany table, buffet and a wet bar. On a day in May, Blaustein convened a meeting of two dozen men, all Jewish. They represented every major studio and television network, the cream of the surviving crop of Hollywood’s élite. “We’ve got to make a deal with the NVA,” he told them flatly.

  The men at the table stared at him. “Arnie, I’m hearing you right on this?” gasped Moshe Feinstein from Dreamworks-Disney, his lit cigar falling from his thick lips into his lap unnoticed. “Mine ears aren’t playing tricks on me, boychik? With Nazis we should make a deal, you’re telling me? With Nazis?”

  “Have you seen your numbers for April, Moe?” asked Blaustein bleakly. “Have you seen all our numbers? We’re getting killed out there, in every sense of the word. The goyische kopf police and the FBI, they know from nothing, they’re chasing their tails all over town and so far they’ve got a barrel of bupkis. Every day these yemach-shmoyniks gun down somebody else, our friends, our best creative and money people, our earners, our rain-makers, the people who make this whole industry move. Every day I talk with Kirby, the FBI assistant director they sent out from Washington, and then I talk with the Chief of Police, then I talk with Homeland Security, and I tell you they got no clue. So we make a deal.”

  “It’s not like we’ve never done business with goniffs before,” said Walter Wexler from World Artists, with a tired shrug. “Hell, sometimes we even budget for it. We pay off union bosses. We pay off Third World dictators to film in their countries, and we pay off all kinds of foreign officials to get our movies screened and aired. We want to shoot in New York, we pay off the vershtunkt Mafia. We want to shoot in East L.A. we pay off the Mexican gang-bangers, we want to shoot in Watts we pay off the shvartzers.”

  “This isn’t a matter of paying off some pissant little goy gangsters so we can work,” raged Feinstein. “These are fucking Nazis! What part about the word Nazis do you not understand, Arnie?”

  “Arnie, there are practical objections as well,” spoke up attorney David Danziger, Paradigm’s senior in-house counsel. Danziger prided himself on his metrosexuality, his handball-trim figure, his flawless capped teeth, and his expensive but tasteful suits; he looked more like a movie star than many of Paradigm’s actors. “Moshe is right. These aren’t just criminals, they’re fanatical anti-Semites on a mission. They don’t want our money, they want our blood, and you know that has historically been the most dangerous time for our people, when we can no longer offer the goyim enough gold or pleasure to buy them off, and we have to start looking around for the exits.”

  “We aren’t exiting Hollywood,” said Sam Glaser from TriVision. “No way. Not happening. Hollywood is not some godforsaken shtetl in Poland we can abandon after the Cossacks come riding through. Hollywood is ours, damn their pig-eating souls to hell! We made it, we turned it into the most golden place in the whole goldeneh medina, and we’re going to keep it always!”

  “No, I agree, we can’t afford to abandon Hollywood, and I’m not just talking about money. No one is suggesting that,” said Danziger. “I was simply pointing out that we can’t buy the NVA off in the normal way we buy off Gentiles, with money or sex or the illusion of power. The second objection is the question of how would we approach them? How do we find our friendly neighborhood fascist death squad and ask them politely to desist? I have no idea.”

  “And what kind of deal do you think we could make with these cannibals, Arnie?” demanded Moshe Feinstein. “If they won’t take our money, what could we offer them to get them to lay off?”

  “I think I can guess,” said Blaustein. “What I ask myself is what brought this bloodbath on all of a sudden? I think I know. I think that somehow the NVA found out about our two pending projects, Homeland and Great White North. They found out and this is their answer. Both of those pictures are on indefinite hold now. They have to be, since all of the top people associated with pre-production are dead or in hiding. I think if we made some kind of public announcement to that effect, to let them know we got the message, and we make some sort of oblique promise not to make any really heavy anti-NVA pictures or TV shows, they might get the message in turn and stop slaughtering us.”

  “In other words, terrorism works,” said Glaser bitterly. “Beautiful! Great message! Way to stand on principle there, Arnie!”

  “When standing on principle loses my studio a billion dollars a month and costs us the lives of dozens of our most bankable talent and our best executive and production minds, principle can go take a shit in the Pope’s hat,” said Blaustein flatly. “When principle means I can’t go home without an armored car and a squad of bodyguards, and I can’t sit by my pool after a hard day’s work and get a nice relaxing blowjob from some shiksa fluff who wants a couple of lines in a sitcom, I say principle shminciple.”

  Feinstein had recovered his cigar and now glared at Blaustein. “So you think
if we grovel to these motherfuckers in public, if we debase ourselves in front of the murderers of Sidney Glick and Lou Woltz and Artie Bernstein, if we issue some kind of public statement that we will be good little sheenies and not say unkind things about these blood-soaked psychopaths who have defiled this most wondrous and shining of all our earthly temples with the blood of God’s own Chosen People, you say if we do that shtick, they will go loping back to the north woods and leave us alone? What makes you think the NVA will do anything except laugh at us and keep on killing us?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Blaustein. “All I’m saying is that we all have businesses to run, and we can’t run them in the middle of a shooting gallery with us as moving targets. I think it’s worth a try.”

  “If only we had some way to talk to them, sit down with them, as repugnant as that would be,” mused Wexler. “We’ve offered five million dollars a head for these swine alive and ten million dead, and it doesn’t seem to have done any good. Maybe we’re going at it from the wrong angle. Suppose we offered the five million apiece to them? I simply can’t believe that much money wouldn’t turn the head of even the most rabid anti-Semite. I mean, from what I read, these are guys with black teeth and tattoos who come from dirty trailer parks and work as pump jockeys and burger-flippers, or they did before all those jobs were taken by Mexicans. We should be able to riffle a roll of hundred dollar bills in their ear, and it will be like the Voice of God to these schmucks.”

  “My guess is that even if we were able to buy off this crew they sent down here for the Oscars, the bosses up in Seattle or Portland would just send down some more,” said Danziger. “And we have no way to get in touch with them in any case, so the point is moot.”

  “Somebody down here knows who and where the fuck they are,” said Rafi Eitam from MGM darkly.