The NVA countered by emphasizing quality as opposed to quantity, by setting teams to locate, track, and take down specific targets in areas where they believed themselves to be safe. It was important to keep the Americans off balance and to maintain the psychological upper hand, as well as interfere with their movements and slow them down as much as possible. More than IEDs, more than ambushes, more than bombing and arson and computer viruses, the sniping campaign slowed the “War On Domestic Terror” to a molasses-like crawl, while the NVA floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. But lethal danger was always just around the corner.
* * *
On a raw and misty morning in January, a large blue panel truck marked Apex Dry Cleaning rolled through a suburban neighborhood in Beaverton. The blue trucks were well known in the metropolitan area. One of the growth sectors in Portland during The Trouble had been home delivery of every kind, since more and more people had become afraid to leave their houses or immediate neighborhoods even for essential services. Anyone who could telecommute to his job by computer did so, and one could now place orders for almost anything online or by phone. Every professional from the few remaining lawyers, to CPAs, to veterinarians and barbers now made house calls. Virtually every store would now deliver groceries, furniture, children’s toys, hardware items, office supplies, pet supplies, liquor, and of course dry cleaning and laundry to their customers. Several media outlets had commented that street traffic in Portland these days seemed to consist of nothing but FATPO and police patrols, and delivery vehicles of every make and model.
Apex was the most popular and extensive home dry cleaning and laundry pick up and delivery service in town. It was also an NVA front company, bought out from the previous owners with a large sum of cash from several Indian casino robberies, and clinched with a little knee-capping to ensure confidentiality. Apex trucks went all over the city, and could be seen anywhere without exciting much comment or suspicion. The trucks rolled through the ring of suburbs on their regular daily rounds, picking up and delivering sealed black bags of laundry and dry-cleaned suits and shirts and other garments on hangers. A few of the sealed black bags contained items other than laundry, since the Apex trucks were invaluable as conveyance between Volunteer safe houses and arms dumps as well. Virtually all of these were now located in the far suburbs ringing the city; the Portland command had made the decision that contact with the enemy in the crowded confines of the city center itself was simply too risky and had pulled back, more or less out of Portland itself, much to the glee of the Centcom who trumpeted the allegedly successful “elimination of terrorism” from downtown as a mighty victory.
On a cold and nasty morning, Cat-Eyes Lockhart was breaking in a new spotter, 18-year-old Volunteer Scott Gardner. Gardner had received his draft notice right out of high school, and he’d decided that if he had to fight it would be for his own people and his own country, and so he had gone AWOL and hooked up with the NVA through his aunt, a little old lady in tennis shoes type whom the rest of his family had always considered to be crack-brained. He had demonstrated a good marksman’s eye and a steady hand and had made his bones in a simple General Order Number Four enforcement action wherein he shot down two Mexicans on the floor of a meat packing plant in Milwaukie, and he’d been assigned sniper duty to replace a Volunteer who had been killed resisting arrest.
The two of them were riding in the back of the truck, with their weapons clamped into brackets built into the front bulkhead, watching events on the passing streets through several small cell phone video cams that had been carefully mounted and concealed on the exterior of the vehicle, and which fed wirelessly into a laptop inside the rear of the truck. They had a four-way split screen, showing them a 360-degree view of the front, back, and sides of the vehicle. They could maximize any of those screens and zoom in on anything of interest. “That’s the one thing I don’t like about these trucks, is having to rely on electronic eyes,” Cat told Gardner. “I like a window I can look out of, but the trouble is that windows imply passengers inside, and we want them to think there’s nothing but laundry in here.” Up front, Volunteer Joseph Mohr, a middle-aged man dressed in blue coveralls and wearing a blue baseball cap, was driving. He and Cat could speak to one another via two inexpensive hand-held radios, children’s toys from Mighty Mart in fact, but good enough for short range communications. The truck had some special modifications that were carefully camouflaged, and would be difficult to detect in a casual once-over at a checkpoint. On each side and in the rear doors were narrow flip-up panels that allowed a rifle barrel to be inserted through the aperture and a shot fired. A trap door opened downward and allowed access to the roof as a firing platform, and the truck’s cab and panels were inlaid with molded Bakelite forms by way of bullet-proofing, which were effective while not weighing the vehicle down as much as steel plating would have done.
“Okay, here’s the procedure,” said Lockhart to Gardner. “These Apex runs are primarily for scouting purposes. You’d be amazed at how much information of all kinds you can pick up by just riding around, a lot of which we pass on to Third Section for analysis.”
“Like what, sir?” asked Gardner.
“Don’t call me sir, I’m just a Volunteer like you,” said Lockhart. “You can just call me Jesse or Jess. Or Cat-Eyes, like everybody and his kid brother seems to do these days.”
“Uh, if you don’t mind my asking, why aren’t you an officer, sir, I mean Jesse?” asked Gardner. “You’re one of the most famous Volunteers of all, so why are you still a Volunteer, so to speak?”
“They keep threatening to promote me, but I’ve managed to hold them off so far,” replied Lockhart. “I got no desire for all the hassles and responsibility. I just like to be out here on the street, shooting things that need to be shot. A lot of guys want to make good in the NVA so they can be politicians or military officers under the Republic, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. People are always ambitious, and we can’t all be starry-eyed idealists. Me, after the war I may go back to Astoria and become a drunk again, or I may not. Haven’t decided yet.”
“So what kind of information are we scouting for?” asked Gardner.
“Just interesting things we see and hear,” Lockhart told him. “Like who’s parking what vehicles where, who’s getting hassled by Fatties and might be sufficiently resentful to help us out, which storefronts and properties are newly vacant, which ones are newly occupied and who’s moved in, places where we can stash things, you name it. But mainly we’re looking for any likely target anywhere along the route, and we’re finding some. Mostly what we’re finding are affirmative action niggers and Mexicans who got affluent enough to get into some of these houses. Now they think they’re hiding in plain sight, so to speak, because we won’t be hunting them in Brady Bunch territory. We’re also looking for anyone we can identify as having anything to do with the police, the government, the media, the bureaucracy, Jews, anyone responsible for employing any of the above, in short anybody who needs removal. But unless someone really big like the governor or a military general or someone on that order pops up on the street in front of us, this is not shoot on sight. We need to be careful and remember all the bad guys who are out there after us, just like we’re after them. Even if we see a nigger or someone whom we know to be hostile, we don’t just blast away like we used to do back in the day. We make a note of the location, and then we send a recon team in to check out the situation, see what the lay of the land is like, see how many there are, try and get a scope on exactly who they are and how important they are in the scheme of things. Above all, we make sure they’re not some kind of FATPO setup. Fatties are starting to use our targeted people as bait, with or without their knowledge and permission. Blacks and homos and couples race-mixing in public, that kind of thing, trying to lure us into attacking when and where they’re waiting for us. Our guys in Seattle and Spokane and a couple of other places have walked into those. Nobody in Portland has yet, and I don’t intend to b
e the first. If we see anyone who looks like a likely candidate, we’ll come back after dark, in two cars, and very carefully scope the whole area, the terrain, and otherwise learn what we can. We want to make sure that the target actually lives in the house where we think he lives, or else he actually makes an appearance at whatever place at such and such a time every day, and that he doesn’t have any unfriendly company hanging around.”
“Sounds like it can get boring,” said Gardner.
“Boring as hell,” agreed Lockhart. “Most parts of a war are. Tell you what, next week I’m making a little trip down to Salem hunting liberal legislators, who are now an endangered species in Oregon. I’ll take you and some of the other new people along, and we’ll see if we can’t help make the breed completely extinct. You and some of the others might get to take your first combat shots there.”
“Out fucking standing!” said Gardner enthusiastically.
“First stop coming up, guys,” said Mohr’s voice on the Mighty Mart radio.
“Got it,” said Lockhart. “Okay, when Joe makes his pickups and deliveries, he has to open the back here and come in, and he has to leave the doors open to make it look right to anyone watching, so we duck down behind this coat rack here just in case anyone gets curious and looks inside. We monitor what he’s doing at the front door on the laptop and see who he’s talking with, who will be mostly homeowners and female, but we check out the whole house and everything our cameras can get in a 180-degree sweep. Check for anything that looks out of place, could be anything from a police car to a black or brown face in the window, anything that indicates there might be something of interest to the Army going on.”
“Got it,” said Gardner.
For an hour the two of them crouched in the back of the truck and watched Volunteer Mohr make routine pickups and deliveries of laundry and dry-cleaned clothing on hangers. Then Cat got a call on his cell phone. He spoke with the person on the other end, and then picked up the radio. “Joe, can we cut this short and get over to the Barnes Road exit off 26, chop-chop, without pissing off too many Apex customers who need their underwear?”
“Yeah, we can swing back later and get the few stops we have left,” replied Mohr. “What’s up, Cat?”
“I just got a call from Brigade. Threesec picked up on a special military jet landing at PDX at four a.m., arriving from an undisclosed location, cleared concourse and all very hush-hush, and then a chopper coming in at the Justice Center heliport at five this morning, possibly from PDX. Now they report an enemy convoy coming out the gates of the Justice Center, Strykers fore and aft, couple of APCs that are presumably full of Fatties, one CNN truck and one Fox News, and in the middle of it all a string of three staff cars, plus two Fattie helicopter gunships overhead. The three staff cars tell us they don’t want us to know which one to hit, so one of them is carrying somebody they know we’ll want to take out. Looks like a drop-in. They’re moving westward up U.S. 26, and Oscar wants us to check it out. Not shoot, just see if we can give them a once-over and see who the hell it is and what’s going on, then maybe we can figure out some way to rain on the parade.”
“Okay, we should be there in maybe four minutes,” said Mohr. “They have a big service road in front of St. Vincent Medical Center and I can cruise around or park there.”
“That may actually be where they’re headed,” said Lockhart. “Not sure why. I’m trying to think what’s out that way, anywhere they could be planning a photo-op. Could you get into the parking lot at St. Vincent, Joe?”
“Not without going through a full search, plus it’s gated and enclosed now, Cat,” said Mohr. “Bremer walls and razor wire and sniper netting. That’s the hospital where they send a lot of wounded Fatties and ZOG bigwigs, and so it’s pretty much on lockdown, Blackwater on the floors and Fatties on the perimeter. Heard they’ve even got a couple of twin .50s mounted on the roof, although that may be bullshit. Even if I could bluff our way in and we could park, we couldn’t get out if the shit hit the fan.”
“Well, maybe they’re going to the hospital for their drop-in, visiting the wounded heroes of Zion and all, or maybe not. Get us there and we’ll see if we can pick ’em up and tag along.” Lockhart put the radio back in its sheath.
“What’s a drop-in, sir, I mean Jesse?” asked Gardner.
“That’s when some really big Zoggie politician or general or celebrity decides to make a little propaganda hay off us evil racist dudes,” explained Lockhart. “They suddenly drop in on an operational area, literally fall out of the sky. Once on the ground they stroll around shaking hands and making little speeches and kissing any babies that haven’t been blown away, trade a few back-slapping jokes with the village idiot, that kind of dog and pony show. They want to show the folks back home how safe it all is, and how the forces of truth, justice, and the Amurrican way are winning, and victory is just around the corner, you get the idea. All the unfriendly locals and the dead bodies and the burned-out vehicles have been swept off the streets, and the whole time the big shots are surrounded by a whole battalion of men and machines and heavy weapons to guard them, but the TV cameras crop those out of the picture, of course. Then they vanish away back into the sky and the shooting starts again. Bush Two and Hillary used to do that crap all the time to us in Iraq. Drop-ins are a real pain in the ass. Everybody’s jumpy as hell. That big throw-down me and Jimmy Wingo and Kicky McGee got into downtown on Flanders Street a few years ago was because of a drop-in, the Vice President. To make matters worse, we didn’t even get him. Never got close.”
“So who could be dropping in on us?” asked Gardner.
“No idea.”
“Chelsea?” suggested the young Volunteer eagerly.
“We should have such luck! That’s what we need to find out, but if it’s someone big enough so clipping him will help bring a White nation any closer into being born, I’m going to try for him, and I’m going to need your help.” Lockhart grinned at him. “Who knows? You may get in your first combat shot as a marksman a lot sooner than you think.”
The truck arrived on the access road and cruised up it slowly, passing the entrance to St. Vincent Hospital, which was now fortified with two steel-shuttered concrete pillar-bunkers on either side, and a heavy steel rolling door. Inside one of the pillboxes, Blackwater Security Lieutenant Roy Dow was instructing a new guard, a turbaned Sikh named Gupta Sayyid Singh, in the use of the CCTV system. “We keep the gates open during the hours of daylight,” Dow told him. “We were getting too many complaints from the medical staff about ambulances being delayed going in and coming out, not to mention employees, so we just use the boom arms on both the entrance and exits during the daytime. At night, the steel doors are shut and they stay shut, opening and closing one vehicle at a time as they are checked out and passed. No exceptions. You’ll be handling the exit today. You log every vehicle out individually and you make sure you look inside, get the license number, and make a notation of the occupants on the day sheet. Access control on the entrance is even more tightly controlled. I don’t care if it’s an ambulance heading for a ten-car pileup or a bombing site, you do not let anybody in or out without making sure you know who they are and what their business is. Whatever’s happened, they’re just going to have to bleed or stroke out or whatever until security regulations are complied with. We are not letting any of these sinners in here to do bad acts.” Dow was another evangelical of the type Blackwater so favored, and he had already irritated the Sikh officer by slipping small Christian comic books into his locker and his lunch bag in the security command post refrigerator. “The cameras command the full length of the access road right down to the on-ramp; make sure that at all times you are aware of what traffic is on that road.”
“Very good, sah,” said Singh. “I should like to be pointing out that blue lorry has just turned around at the end of the access road and is coming back this way.”
“Yeah, so I see,” said Dow, peering into the television monitor. “Okay, we’ll use that
as a test vehicle. Probably nothing, you see Apex trucks all over Portland these days since the fascists have terrorized decent people so badly they’re scared to drop off their own dry cleaning, but for all we know the NVA could have hijacked that truck and it could be filled with a fertilizer bomb big as the one that took out the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. So when you see something like that, or anything suspicious, you click on the suspect vehicle or person using your mouse, like this . . .” Dow demonstrated, “Then you get the little hourglass icon for about ten seconds and you have to hit F3, like this. The cameras have multiple lenses and what you do there is you lock one lens onto the target and you get a split screen that follows the target anywhere, there, see? You now have a separate screen that has all the functions and capabilities of the main screen, like there, see? Okay, it’s coming up to our position. If it slows down or does anything else hinky, you hit the code orange button. That flashes in the other gatehouse as well, so the other guards will know to pay attention, something’s up. They can see your split screen as well. Okay, they’re not slowing down, they’re going on by. Probably took the wrong exit off 26 and they’ll be going back on the highway.”
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