The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t cover the Northwest War of Independence, or make movies or TV episodes about it,” explained Brewer patiently. “You’re right, it would be kind of ridiculous to pretend nothing is happening, although you guys did all right with that during the run up to the Americans’ attacks on Iran and Saudi Arabia. You want to make a movie about the war in the Northwest, fine. You want to do a TV drama episode or even a whole series about the rebellion, knock yourselves out. But there will be no hatchet jobs like those obscene things you were planning on, Homeland and Great White North. You want to show the violence and bloodshed, sure, you’ve got to in order to be accurate. But we expect to see balance. We expect you to show the torture chambers in the Portland Justice Center and the FATPO barracks as well as NVA bombs and kneecappings. We expect you to show bad FBI and U.S. Attorneys as well as bad NVA men, and when you do portray Volunteers we expect them to be normal, human characters, not one-dimensional stereotypes or clowns or racist villains out of central casting. We expect you to deal extensively with why the Volunteers are doing what they’re doing, and I don’t mean your usual horseshit about ‘hate’. We expect you to portray a terrible but complex and highly nuanced situation as just that, complex and difficult with the good and the bad evenly distributed on both sides. We don’t expect you to make NVA propaganda movies. We’re starting to do that ourselves in a small way, and after independence the Republic will produce enough of those on our own. But we expect balance.”

  “And who defines balance?” demanded Rafi Eitam from MGM.

  “I do. I’m your consultant, remember. The guy who makes sure that when you go into your swimming pool it’s just for a dip. You’ll have my number. If you’re going to deal with the Northwest in even a tangential way, I expect to see a script with a full treatment, before the first klieg switches on and the first camera rolls. If there is anything that might be even a little iffy, you call me, we’ll discuss the problem or project, and I will give you an opinion.”

  “An opinion backed up by bullets and explosives,” said Wexler bitterly.

  “Precisely,” agreed Brewer with a chilly smile. “The kind of opinion that it will behoove you to listen to. The only kind of opinion it seems the Jewish people are inclined to listen to.”

  XXVII

  Two On The Bounce

  Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage;

  For we will fetters put upon this fear

  Which now goes too free-footed.

  Hamlet—Act II, Scene 3

  On an unseasonably warm afternoon in October, Eric Sellars and Annette Ridgeway sat at a corner table in the Food for Thought Café, the student-run eatery in the Smith Memorial Student Union on the campus at Portland State University. Eric was wearing baggy canvas trousers and a T-shirt with a rock band logo on it, Annette was wearing a green wool pullover blouse and jeans, and both of them were wearing the obligatory American baseball caps on their heads. They had double lattés, small plates of politically correct vegetarian quiche, and open books in front of them. They looked for all the world like a couple of college kids on a normal snack and study date. In actual fact, they were studying their fellow students.

  Although full-fledged Volunteers with A Company, little of their work for the NVA had so far involved hands-on active service. Annette’s brief Lorelei stint as “Mary Jones” and the subsequent interrogation of Dawson Zucchino were as close as they had personally gotten so far to the wet work, other than when they had dispatched the late and unlamented Lucius Flammus. Most of their activity for the Army, as the rebellion in the Northwest entered its fourth year, consisted of intelligence gathering and surveillance as well as a few special sabotage and monkey-wrenching assignments. For example, they had used the school’s computers and a black student’s password to upload a series of viruses into the IT systems at places like the Oregonian, the local IRS office, the Portland public school system, and even one database they were able to access at the feared Justice Center itself. Because their privileged status tended to give the two of them access to places, people, and events on a level of society denied to other Volunteers, Tom and Becky had proven to be an invaluable asset not only to their original company commander and now First Brigade commandant, Billy Jackson, but also to Oscar in the Third Section. Jackson had recently succeeded to the commandant slot when Tommy Coyle had gone over to Second Brigade following the death of Harry Hannon in a gun battle at a FATPO checkpoint six weeks before. The new A Company CO was Lieutenant Jimmy Wingo, just returned from the successful Operation We Are Not Amused down in Los Angeles.

  Portland State was one of the few full-blown, radical left-wing campuses remaining in the Northwest, with such appurtenances as an African-American Students’ Union, a Hispanic Students’ Association, and functioning chapters of Anti-Racist Action and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance. In most other parts of the Homeland, these groups had withered away on campus and elsewhere for lack of participation, as the NVA either rubbed out their participants or their members saw the handwriting on the wall and relocated to sunnier and less hostile climes. But Portland State was right in the middle of a city saturated with ZOG police, FATPO and private security, and surrounded by a still significant urban minority population as muds and faggots fled from other areas of the Northwest to cower and rage impotently in Portland from behind the cover of the FATPO guns. Up in Washington, the Puget Sound area was much larger and more spread out, and contained more Volunteers, and so Seattle and environs had been very largely cleaned up by now and was barely one percent non-white. Portland was far more concentrated and densely populated, and therefore easier for the regime to lock down with a concentration of men and firepower. It was difficult to believe that not thirty miles to the west one entered the Third Battalion’s Bandit Country, a liberated zone where not a dark skin or a federal badge was to be seen. But Portland itself remained a left-liberal stronghold, one of the few real bastions of government support remaining in the Northwest, and Portland State University was a hotbed of political correctness and anti-racist hysteria.

  Eric and Annette had spent their freshman year and summer school tracking all of this activity, identifying the ringleaders and major players, clocking their movements, cataloging their habits and known associates, watching everyone from the faculty and the student body on down to the custodial staff and numerous rent-a-cops on the security force, one of whom was also a Northwest Volunteer. Eric and Annette had no idea who their comrade on the security staff was; they had an e-mail address and a series of codes, and nothing more. They were to make contact only in the event they needed somehow to disable or blindside the security cameras and other school surveillance systems that followed the students everywhere they went. Eric would send an e-mail through a special connection on his wireless laptop, using both coded content and an NVA-designed encryption system, which everyone hoped like hell the federals were either unaware of or couldn’t break if they were. Tom and Becky described what they needed done and when, and within a few hours whoever it was would get back to them giving them a yea or nay as to whether or not it could be done. Whoever was on the other end was presumably as ignorant of their identities as they were of his or hers.

  This was how they had twice managed to take down the electronic surveillance and disable certain alarms long enough for an EOD delivery team to get onto campus and plant two small but powerful bombs. One was in the Administration building, in the office of the Dean of Diversity, an East Indian with a doctorate in Multicultural Studies named Patel. The wog opened his desk drawer one morning and a stick of C-4 blew him through his own bulletproof picture window and onto the quad below. The second device, disguised as an orange traffic bollard, had detonated on the exit ramp in Parking Building Number One, killing the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, his driver, and two of his U.S. Marshal bodyguards. They were leaving campus after a Careers Day presentation wherein he was attempting to recruit gay and minority personnel for the many new facilities that were o
pening in places like Nevada and North Dakota, especially the mass relocation camps that now received the populations of entire small towns in the Northwest whose loyalty to the United States was considered suspect. The feds were especially looking for gay prison guards. Historically speaking, homosexual sadists have always been the worst and most cruel torturers.

  The Tom and Becky duo had also managed to set up over a dozen of their teachers and classmates for NVA hits and punishment beatings, mostly off campus but two that took place on the grounds. They had repeatedly volunteered to do these jobs themselves, but Jackson always vetoed it. “No, you two are far too valuable operating above ground for us to risk blowing your cover,” he told them. “I will give you as much advance warning as I can before any operation you have assisted with, so that you can make sure you are both very visible and you can account for every second of your time if you’re questioned. I don’t want you caught.” Annette and Eric knew they weren’t just valuable as spies on a lefty but minor college campus. They provided a special window for the NVA into the world of the West Coast’s political and corporate power élite, simply by keeping their ears open around the house and socializing with their parents’ set whenever the opportunity offered. Both still hung in their families’ wealthy and well-connected circles and passed on volumes of information from those circles, and also on some occasions the names of some of their friends and acquaintances, and their parents’ friends and acquaintances, who showed signs of being dangerously fed up with the way America was going and who in their opinion might possibly be approachable by the NVA.

  The two young people been compelled to become actors, on stage at all times, and they had managed to convince the college authorities, their fellow students, and so far the small army of FBI and FATPO snitches on campus that their minds were neat and clean and free of any taint of wicked racism or doubt. They each took several diversity and minority related classes; their test scores were always perfect and their exam papers pure PC orthodoxy. Both of them had been approached by the campus wing of the Young Democrats, and they had joined with alacrity. Eric was now head of the YD debating team and Annette was the chapter secretary with access and control of all the files and membership info, all of which she passed on to Oscar as soon as she got it. Their membership in the YDs and their impeccable family backgrounds got them invitations to local meetings, parties and functions (always held in heavily fortified locations) and also got them drafted to serve as waiters and ushers at the Governor’s New Year’s Eve ball, into which Eric was able to smuggle a mini camcorder and record all kinds of interesting people and snippets of conversation.

  Periodically Jackson would question them, politely but comprehensively, as to how they were holding up under the stress. “To be frank, sir, we’re thriving on it,” Eric confessed to him. “We know we’re doing something of historical importance. We have a purpose in life, which almost none of these other kids have. As corny as this sounds, we feel alive, like we’re hitting on all cylinders.”

  “A purpose in life will have that effect, yes,” Jackson replied.

  There was only one thing that worried them now they were entering their sophomore year. Their monogamous, heterosexual, and racially homogenous relationship was becoming a bit noticeable, and they were both under pressure to demonstrate their commitment to diversity in the traditional American collegiate way, through casual and promiscuous sexual behavior. Especially Annette. “They’re starting to call us Brad and Janet, after the white bread couple in the Rocky Horror Picture Show,” she told Wingo in their first briefing with him as company commander early in September. The two of them met with Wingo and Kicky McGee in the kitchen of a private home in McMinnville. They could heard odd rattling and cranking noises from the basement, and once a man they’d never seen entered the room and handed Wingo several sheets of 11 X 17 paper with large block printing on it, which he looked over, nodded, and handed back. Apparently the Party had a good old-fashioned underground, illegal printing press going downstairs.

  “And how many slimy kikes have come on to you wanting to be your Dr. Frankenfurter?” asked Kicky.

  “A few,” admitted Annette. “And a few wogs as well, Bengalis or Indonesians or something of the kind. They really go for blondes.”

  “With me it’s high-yellow mulatto chicks and this one goddamned faggot,” muttered Eric. “I’m scared I’m going to lose my temper and slug him.”

  “Make sure you don’t,” ordered Wingo. “That’s a hatecrime in itself and even if you can talk your way out of formal charges, it will draw the kind of attention that will make you useless as an undercover. You know the drill. One single offhand remark, one small action that indicates to the people watching you that someone’s mind is not completely under control, and they start a file on you. What worries me is that your refusal to act like dogs in heat may draw the same kind of attention. It’s a break in the pattern for proper Amurrican white kids of your age, and one so unusual as to be noticeable to someone who’s paying attention, and you’d better believe somebody on that campus is on the FBI or FATPO payroll and they’re paying attention. From their point of view, you should both be fucking anything with a pulse, drinking yourselves paralytic every night, and smoking, injecting, or snorting every known drug into your systems. Eventually some government snoop is going to wonder why you’re not, and mention you to someone somewhere in the security apparatus. I want you both to keep your antennae on high reception, and let me know the minute you pick up on anything at all that indicates that you are under surveillance or investigation, however quietly. In the meantime, keep on with what you’re doing. By the way, the word has gotten around, and I’ve been asked by Captain Hatfield and the boys from Third Batt to convey their thanks for the heads up back in June and a 21-gun salute to the both of you, especially Comrade Becky.”

  Now they sat at the table in the Food For Thought, quietly noting the comings and goings of their classmates. Eric had his laptop open to WordPad, and occasionally he made a cryptic note on thermodynamics that was in fact a reminder to himself to do something that had nothing to do with heat resistance. “There’s Keisha Spease,” Annette said quietly, glancing in the direction of a black female student who was vocal in a number of left-wing causes.

  “I’ve been keeping my ears open to pick up on anything about her, but apparently she never sets foot anywhere off campus,” said Eric, also sotto voce.

  “The niggers are finally learning,” said Annette. “God knows, it’s taken them long enough. We must have at least four hundred of them hiding here. Thank God you and I are still living at home and we’re not here in the dorms all night. I keep having this fantasy of a big midnight raid with about twenty of the Boys, locked and loaded, just going through the quad and through the dorms blasting.”

  Eric nodded. “I tried to interest the new CO in my old idea of dropping some chug-chugs or whizz-bangs on this shithole one midnight, but I got the same answer. Even after dark, there are too many white kids around, too much potential for collateral damage.”

  “He hasn’t seen some of these so-called white kids,” muttered Annette. “These are even worse whiggers than some of those dweebs we had at Ashdown. Lottie Rosenfeld, over there by the salad bar.”

  “Miss Bull Dyke of PSU. I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to hit on you.”

  “She did, I think,” said Annette. “Once in BA class, once here, and once in Young Dems. I dumbed up and just plain refused to follow where she was leading, hoping she’d get the message. She must think I really am stupid.”

  “This is America. One doesn’t dumb up, one dumbs down,” pointed out Eric. “If it’s possible to dumb any downer. I can’t believe that they’re not teaching logarithms in math classes here. They claim it would be unfair to minority students because logs are an artificial construction of Dead White European Males. Apparently math can be racist too. I wouldn’t want to drive over any bridge these coons and wogs design or fly in any airplane they’ve worked on, that
’s for sure. What’s Lottie been up to lately?”

  “Putting the moves on that little freshman girl Wendy Sykes, and getting her pissed off enough so I think Wendy might be approachable. I wish they’d let us do some recruiting ourselves. Lottie’s also on the YD Gay and Lesbian Committee, and they’re throwing some kind of social at the Convention Center for Thanksgiving. That might be a good place for her to meet up with our tattooed lady friend and her main man.”

  “Something like that is going to be guarded like Fort Knox, maybe even a deliberate Fattie trap using the pervs as bait,” said Eric. “But yeah, it needs passing along, especially now that Cat Lockhart is back in town. See if you can worm the details out of Lottie without getting groped, will you? She won’t give me the time of day. There’s Dr. Thompson. Did we ever confirm if he was banging that Sheila girl from his graduate student class?”

  “Yeah, but she’s old enough, and she’s white.”

  “Still, his wife might not appreciate it, and it could be used to put pressure on him if we ever need anything from him,” said Eric. “Oh, before I forget, I noticed they’ve got a new beverage vendor in here, a Pepsi distributor from Corvallis according to the truck. Wonder what happened to the old one?”