The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  About dusk, the two urban brigades of the NVA coalesced into a little over a hundred assault teams, four to six people per team, with at least two vehicles per team. Some of these were combined into larger special task forces with specific objectives. It was dark and overcast with no moon, but not raining, cold but not unbearably so. Everybody was out for this one, even covert operatives like Ray Ridgeway, who operated as a spotter and was able to zero some of Oscar’s assassin squad in on several wealthy Zionist targets he surreptitiously located for them wherever they were hiding from the ruckus, in their homes, their clubs and offices, and in swank hotel rooms. In addition, Coyle had at his disposal around 250 well-armed Volunteers from Third Battalion down on the coast, who arrived by assorted back roads and assembled at the safe house known as the Sugar Shack. Zack Hatfield and Coyle tried to move them out almost as fast as they came in to make sure too many Volunteers weren’t assembled in the same place and vulnerable to a surprise attack. After conferring with Hatfield, Coyle had the Third Battalion people lay a series of ambushes at over a dozen on and off ramps along U.S. Highways 26 and 30 as well as Interstate Five coming into Portland, the object being to control access to the western part of the greater metropolitan area and interdict any attempt by FATPO or the police to move large bodies of men and weapons from point to point on the ground.

  Commandant Billy Jackson and First Brigade were assigned the mission of attacking and doing as much damage as possible in downtown and North Portland, the last remaining African ghetto of any significance remaining in the Homeland. “If it looks at all feasible, I want to see if we can clean out that whole damned black spot tonight,” Coyle told him. “We need to beautify the City of Roses by making sure there’s not a single black face on the streets. Oh, and while you’re at it, see if you can clean up Portland University. According to Tom and Becky the few decent white students live off campus, so it’s pretty much a free fire zone.”

  “Can you let me have the smokers, Tom?” asked Jackson. “I think they’re just what the doctor ordered for those putrid groves of academe up there.”

  “That’s affirmative,” said Coyle with a nod. “Tonight we unveil all three of our secret weapons and introduce ’em to Mister Joo.”

  Second Brigade’s task was to hunt down, engage, and destroy any FATPOs and police whom they could ambush and outgun, pin them down at their checkpoints with small arms fire and RPGs, and eventually force them to pull back into static positions like their barracks, or police stations, or the Justice Center, to occupy their attention, interfere with their movement, and give the other Volunteers free rein to do their thing in the city. Once the melee got started there was a good deal of overlap between all three of these missions and forces, and by morning the situation was so confused that no one could ever really tell who did what and to whom.

  By seven o’clock that night the television news had figured out that something was going on, and interrupted regular programming with a series of increasingly confused and hysterical reports and rumors. FATPO and police patrols moving through the winter darkness were being fired on from every corner and rooftop by snipers and RPGs, by small parties of Volunteers who then vanished into the night. What little liberal-lefty night life still existed in Portland was down in the Pearl District; now small groups of men and women were running through the streets throwing hand grenades and Molotov cocktails through the doors and windows of trendy yuppie fern bars and night clubs, shooting anyone with a black or brown face, dodging into alleyways and in and out of buildings when the police pursued, then turning and firing on their pursuers. By seven thirty the downtown area was rattling and crackling with gunshots, bursts of automatic weapons fire and the intermittent hollow boom of explosions, mixed with screaming and shouting as patrons of various establishments fled for cover.

  Media news trucks and reporters who attempted to get out onto the streets and report what was going on were also fired on, and several journalists and techs were killed, including a well-known correspondent from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. All television stations in Portland had long since been surrounded by Bremer walls, razor wire, and details of heavily armed private “security contractors,” but the NVA had scoped them out previously and developed contingency plans, which they implemented for Op Festival. A long-standing target on the NVA’s wish list were the combined studios of both Fox News channels, KPTV and KPDX, on Greenbriar Parkway in Beaverton. Elements of B Company, First Brigade, and a special EOD team had been planning a major tickle there for a while, and they moved it forward for Op Festival. At approximately 8 p.m. there was a rattle of gunfire and a large explosion outside, and one of the station’s cameramen was able to film a stolen bulldozer crashing through the heavy security doors and into the lobby, followed by two men in ski masks who lugged a footlocker into the building, placed it in front of the locked door to the studio area, and ran out into the darkness along with the bulldozer’s driver. The cameraman saw a cute little cartoon sticker of a Red Baron in a German biplane from World War One on the footlocker, and he had sense enough to run like hell. He made it out of the building alive before it came down, with his camera and his footage, which earned him several journalistic awards. No one else survived.

  A few minutes later across town, the studio of KATU-TV shivered and shook in mid-broadcast live on the air, as a series of home-made rockets with high explosive warheads screamed over the Bremer walls into the fortified compound and slammed into the building. News anchors Roger Coleman and Edie Berry calmly stayed on the air talking to their audience for almost a minute with lights and plaster falling from the ceiling all around them, before the power went out and the station was off the air. Both survived and were awarded Medals of Freedom by President Chelsea Clinton, as well as jobs on the east coast since both refused to go back to Portland.

  A team attached to First Brigade EOD loaded up trucks and vans with their latest creation, over a thousand home-made potato-masher style stick grenades made from broom and rake handles and lengths of five-inch diameter black iron pipe, loaded with a variety of explosives and ignited by short lengths of fuse. Using coded communication on cell phones, CB radios, and wireless laptops they were able to locate and rendezvous with other crews from around the city and pass out dozens of these per assault team. The devices worked well, and the peculiar clunking thump! in the distance of the potato mashers became a well-remembered feature of that night. “Make sure that before you light one of these, you look at the paint around the nipple here where the fuse goes in, comrades,” cautioned Volunteer Bob LaFollette at every distribution. “You got plain black metal, white band, blue band, and red band, and the blue and red are kind of hard to see in the dark. Use a flashlight if you have to, because these colors are important. They tell you what kind of charge you’re throwing. No paint at all is simple black powder, packed with roofing nails or sheet metal screws, for anti-personnel use. White is nitrocellulose mixed with white phosphorus. That’s an incendiary; if there is anything burnable around, these babies will ignite it. Red is three sticks of TNT crammed inside the case. That’s for a big blast when you really want to blow a hole in something. There aren’t many blues, but they’re military C-4 and also some bathtub gelignite the Red Baron cooked up on his day off. Those are for enemy vehicles. Toss one of those under a Stryker and the blast will flip the damned thing over on its back like a crab.”

  By eight o’clock serious casualty reports were coming in and the hospital emergency rooms were filling up. Lights were going out all over town as the NVA knocked out power transformers on poles and brought down carefully selected lines, plunging the Pearl and the most heavily American-occupied areas into darkness. “Try to keep the power on in the white areas of town,” Coyle had ordered. “The power plants are too heavily guarded to be attacked without unacceptable casualties anyway. I want the word to get around that we do differentiate, and that we’re not just a bunch of loonies out to cause mass destruction for the hell of it. The white public
has to understand that this isn’t just random violence, that there is a reason for it and it’s directed only against the people who don’t belong here, not against them.”

  Teams of gunmen drove through the darkened streets to specific addresses, working off lists provided by the Third Section of suspected government sympathizers whom the NVA hadn’t yet gotten around to dealing with. Rather than take the time to break in and go searching for specific people, they would stop outside a Zionist house, and even if it was dark inside they would fire a magazine or two into the windows and toss a grenade, a pipe bomb, or a burning cocktail onto the porch or at the front door. This conveyed the message quite effectively to the persons of suspect loyalty inside: we know who you are and where you live, and relocation to more hospitable climes is advisable. Then the Volunteers would roll on to their next target. Other teams roamed the city targeting certain buildings owned by the government, by Jews, by multi-national corporations or by other assorted anti-NVA elements. These were businesses, warehouses, offices, community centers, multi-racial and multi-cultural churches, so forth and so on. They calmly pulled over, went inside or broke in, ran off any onlookers with a few warning shots, doused the floor and fixtures with gasoline, and torched the place. By nine o’clock there were dozens of fires reported all across the city, and the firefighting services were stretched to the limit and beyond.

  FATPO and police trying to respond to various emergencies around town ran into the Third Battalion’s ambushes on the exit ramps, including a large supply of RPGs, which the NVA had recently acquired from certain Russian international arms dealers with the tacit approval of the government in Moscow. “Damn, we never had enough of these babies before!” cackled Volunteer Hiram Johnson of Third Battalion’s C Company to his comrade Mike Buda, as he watched a Portland PB van burn with several dead cops inside it. “Especially at Sunset Beach!”

  “Yeah, now we can use ’em up like popcorn,” agreed Buda. “Okay, Hi, you’re loaded. Now if we can just get Fattie to send us some more targets!”

  “If they won’t come to us, we’ll go to them,” said Lieutenant Ricky Parmenter, coming up behind them in the darkness. He was wearing what he now considered to be his lucky cowboy hat from Sunset Beach. “Cap just called, says we need to change position after each contact so they don’t try to zero in on us with choppers. We’re bugging out to the Canyon Road exit.”

  The elements from First Brigade’s D and E Companies sent to assault the University of Portland found the campus in chaos, devoid of police or FATPOs, all of whom had been ordered into North Portland or elsewhere through some act of carelessness or incompetence. About 50 Volunteers split into two groups and moved into Eric and Annette’s alma mater from Park Avenue on the south side of campus and 12th Avenue on the north side. The electricity was out, but the university’s emergency generators had kicked in, so there was some light outside and in the larger buildings. Groups of students, mostly non-whites, were milling around on the quads, in the student union and in the dorms, some with candles, many with beers. A number of persons of color and wildly bearded Jewish-looking types were up on benches or planter walls haranguing small clumps of listeners with long screeching tirades of the left-wing “Fight the Fascists!” variety; one oddball Mexican was actually shouting the famous Communist battle cry from the Spanish Civil War, “No pasaran!” Some of the students had gotten hold of a motley variety of pistols and long arms from somewhere, probably gang-banger hardware, and they were flourishing them and firing them in the air, jumping around like demented monkeys and screaming about fighting the Fascists.

  Then all of the sudden there was the NVA in the flesh, coming at them from out of the darkness, gun muzzles flashing, cutting them down with aimed shots like shooting fish in a barrel, and the student scum turned and stampeded in terror. The Fascists passed all right, as they had done in 1938. Finally the Volunteers turned loose the first NVA secret weapon of the night, a pair of two-man crews each armed with a home-made flamethrower built from scuba diving tanks that contained a pressurized load of home-made napalm, one of the Red Baron’s creations, shot in a thin but volatile stream through a nozzle adapted from a welding torch. The “smokers” worked perfectly as they went from building to building and dorm to dorm. Inside twenty minutes the entire campus was in flames.

  In North Portland FATPO dug in, determined to protect the last major black enclave in the Pacific Northwest as if they were an endangered species, which of course they were. The federals threw up a perimeter of checkpoints, sandbagged positions and hastily-strung razor wire on every corner and intersection. They issued M-16 rifles and loaded magazines to every able-bodied black male and female who asked for one, thus augmenting the already formidable arsenals of the Portland Crips, Bloods, and other street gangs. Jackson was cagey; his scouts reported what the enemy was doing, and he avoided sending his squads attacking directly into the fetid slum streets where they might get cornered or caught in a crossfire. Instead, he staged hit and run raids on the outposts around the perimeter of the ghetto with sporadic small arms fire and Molotov cocktails to keep the Fatties pinned down, while at the same time he sent teams of arsonists infiltrating the area via alleys and side streets and over fences. These set fire to every wooden building they could break into or otherwise breach with cocktails, many of them containing the Red Baron’s special flamethrower mix, although the white phosphorus grenades came in quite handy as well. There were a lot of wooden buildings in Portland. The NVA ringed the black district with fires, and then they made sure the fires burned inward and not outward into the white neighborhoods by simply refusing to let the fire trucks into the area, while allowing them to put out any blazes that transgressed onto white streets.

  Then Jackson broke out the NVA’s second secret weapon of the evening’s gala event, two carefully hoarded factory-made 81-mm mortars bought from corrupt Army ordnance personnel at Fort Lewis. Both weapons had skilled military-trained crews to serve them, recruited from among the NVA’s many Iraq and Iran veterans. He placed one mortar on Greeley Avenue and the other on Columbia Boulevard, assigned teams of riflemen to guard them from interference, and without hesitation he gave the order, “Fire up every round we’ve got, boys. We’ll be able to get more, and we need to give Cat Lockhart a hell of a final salute.”

  For several hours the two mortars proceeded to rain over 500 shells down on North Portland in long, slow sweeps, working a grid pattern rather than trying to hit specific Federal targets. The shells landed indiscriminately on houses, stores, in the streets, on FATPO positions, while the dozens of fires crept closer and closer, spreading through the slum house to house in the absence of the fire engines. This sent mobs of blacks into the streets where they ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, screaming and bellowing in their fear and hatred of the white man, some wounded, many of them raving drunk or stoned on crack, many of them waving weapons in the air they’d gotten from the FATPO or pulled from their own hidden stashes. Rival gangs shot at each other, some shot at the FATPOs, and the FATPOs, almost as ill-disciplined as the mob, fired back. Store windows were smashed and the negroes began to loot, staggering down the street loaded with everything from plasma television sets to cases of potato chips, only to be shot down by bullets or blown to pieces by a falling mortar shell. When the black populace tried to escape from the area they were met by muzzle flashes and rattling machine guns twinkling in the darkness as the NVA cut them down. By ten o’clock at night North Portland was a burning madhouse. The FATPO commander realized that his men were starting to desert or join the looters, and in order to retain any semblance of control he had to give the order to evacuate and return to barracks. The Portland mayor and Oregon Governor Mike Tsafendas were on the phone with Washington, D.C. screaming for the military to come and bail out the Fatties and what was left of the hapless Portland Police Bureau.

  There were three main FATPO barracks in Portland, one on the east side on Foster Road, one in North Portland at the Portland
International Airport, and a third on the south side on Ross Island in the Willamette River. The FATPOs abandoned their posts, retreated to what transport they had left, and by midnight they were moving in three columns of heavily armored vehicles through the streets toward their fortified sanctuaries. It was then that the NVA unleashed the third secret weapon Coyle had spoken of earlier, a fleet of six Somali and Taliban-style “war wagons” similar to Zack Hatfield’s command vehicle, pickup trucks and converted SUVs on which had been mounted the deadly Browning .50-caliber machine gun.

  The NVA had already used several similar vehicles mounting lighter twin 7.62-mm guns to launch attacks in various places around the Northwest, and Portland had four of these as well, which were now sent zipping through the still chaotic and burning streets of North Portland blasting away at anything that moved, with deadly results. But the .50s were hard to obtain, and ammunition for them in sufficient quantities even harder, so Coyle had been holding them in reserve until some special occasion called for their unveiling. The war wagons made zig-zag attacks against the FATPO convoys from the side streets and from the rear of the convoys, the heavy armor-piercing rounds smashing through whole engine blocks and raking the unarmored vehicles with death, tracer bullets sometimes igniting the vehicles and detonating their fuel tanks. The columns had to move slowly, because the lead vehicles were targeted by RPGS, fired from behind walls, from rooftops, around corners, from any cover that offered. The rocket grenades and the .50s weren’t much good against the FATPO Strykers or armored personnel carriers, but the trucks were vulnerable. Few of them made it back inside the Federal Bremer walls. Those FATPOs who were not killed outright when their trucks were demolished kept on retreating on foot, and were picked off one by one or trapped in cul-de-sacs when they became lost in the pitch-black streets and wiped out.