The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  At the beginning of September Sheriff Ted Lear and his remaining officers, sheriff’s deputies and town police from the municipalities, were mustered en masse into the new national police force, the Northwest Civil Guard. Ted was given a brevet rank of major and a new uniform; a heavy khaki shirt, dark green trousers, and jackboots with the Alpine-style ski cap as headgear. “I look like a Nazi Stormtrooper,” he grumbled. “Especially with this thing.” He thumbed the eagle and Swastika patch sewn over his right shirt pocket.

  “I think that’s kind of the idea,” said Hatfield. “I’d say of all the movement’s various factions and tendencies, over half of us are National Socialist to some degree or other. Helps balance out the fanatical Christians, the Christian Identity element, the libertarian quasi-anarchist types, the pagan fanatics, the Heroic Vitalists and whatnot. National Socialism is turning out to be a unifying thread because just about everybody agrees with at least ninety percent of it.”

  “What’s a Heroic Vitalist?” asked Ted.

  “Haven’t got that quite figured out yet,” admitted Zack. “But it sure sounds cool.”

  The military and political situation in the Northwest remained volatile and tense. The peace negotiations had commenced on schedule, with delegations from the NVA, the United States government, the Red Cross, the United Nations, and every media outlet in the world stuffed into the huge Lewis and Clark luxury hotel on the outskirts of Longview, Washington. [See A Mighty Fortress by the same author.] Every television channel, including those that had been taken over by the new Republic’s fledgling Northwest Broadcasting Authority, was filled with almost nothing anymore but news reporting from the conference, interviews with participants, official statements and press releases, speculation, rumors, gossip, and a tsunami of outright propaganda from both sides. The negotiations dragged on over many weeks with nothing seemingly getting accomplished, while out in the hinterlands of the Northwest the Nationalist forces quietly squeezed ZOG out of large swathes of territory. A village here, a stretch of road there, a factory or police station somewhere else fell into the NDF’s hands every day. Everywhere except in Portland itself.

  Zack’s main worry militarily was the fate of the bridges across the Columbia River, the two main ones at Astoria and Longview, and also the bridges over Youngs Bay between Astoria and Warrenton. “We’re vulnerable as hell,” he admitted to his staff in one of their regular conferences. “Those bridges get bombed out, and a few more get knocked down along Highway 101, and we are virtually cut off from the rest of the country here. The Americans can do it, too. Not sure why they haven’t yet. They have jets, copter gunships, B-52s, Cruise missiles, robot drones and God knows what else, and they can blow those bridges any time they want to. We have no anti-aircraft capability at all on the ground besides small arms, and our air force at this moment consists of a collection of Cessnas and other private planes as well as some media news copters we’ve confiscated.”

  “I thought we were going to get some SAMs from the Russkis, sir?” asked newly minted Major Rick Parmenter.

  “There’s some kind of hold-up,” said Hatfield. “The Russians have been quietly backing us for years, as you know, what with the way successive American governments keep grinding their noses in the dirt, determined to keep Russia a third-class world power militarily and economically. But now that things have reached this sensitive point they don’t want to be seen to be backing us. There have been enough questions raised already at Longview and elsewhere about all these Russian small arms and ammo that keeps rocking up in our hands.”

  “The fact that our negotiating team was flown into Longview by a thinly disguised Russian military helicopter and a Russian crew wasn’t exactly subtle, either,” remarked Colonel Lennart Ekstrom of the NDF’s new Quartermaster Corps.

  “I asked Red about that, and he said basically we simply didn’t know which Americans we could trust not to have a mysterious accident on the way in,” Hatfield told them. “Be that as it may, the Russkis understand that the U.S. government is now naturally anxious to hold on to air superiority as a bargaining tool, since if these negotiations go south and the war resumes, it will be more conventional in nature and they might finally get a chance to use some of their high-tech toys against us. Moscow wouldn’t mind upsetting that apple cart, but they don’t want to be too obvious about it, hence the delay in getting our SAM batteries delivered. But that doesn’t help our immediate problem. That gung-ho Marine general in Portland, Delmar Partman, has been saying some ominous things about refusing to go along with any treaty negotiated at Longview if it ‘sunders our precious Union’ as he puts it. I don’t know if that moo is being scripted for him from Washington or not, whether somebody is winding Partman up or whether he’s doing this on his own, but Third Section seems to think that he’s dead serious about refusing to surrender and forcing a pitched battle.”

  “Which the Jews hope will create a chaos situation and give them a chance to tear up the treaty and return to full occupation again, blaming the whole thing on us, of course,” added Colonel Wayne Hill grimly.

  The provisional government of the Northwest American Republic, acting under the mandate of the October 2006 draft Constitution created back in the days when the movement was little more than one half-insane old man playing with his computer, had instituted a Bureau of Race and Resettlement to begin dealing with the problems caused by the massive population movement and dispersal. In Portland, Marine General Partman issued more and more bellicose statements about refusing to surrender the city to the Nationalists regardless of whatever was decided at Longview. In the rural areas skirmishing continued between the expanding NDF and the remaining government forces. The result was a two-way flow of refugees: Unionists fleeing into Portland and streams of white people who either harbored Nationalist sympathies, or simply wanted to get away from the bullying black and brown thugs of FATPO, who fled away from the city. There was a steady flow of traffic up and down Interstate 5. Most remaining non-whites in the Northwest, as well as many white middle and upper-class families packed their belongings and fled from what they feared would be a cartoonish totalitarian state of the kind the media had always portrayed all past white nationalist régimes to be. At the same time massive numbers of white families from California and the Southwest packed as well and fled to the Northwest for fear of the growing Hispanic separatist Frente de la Raza movement. The FDLR was already staking a claim to a new Hispanic state of Aztlan to be located in the Southwest, either as an independent nation, or possibly a United States territory, or even a province of Mexico itself. Much of the incoming white flight came to the North Shore area. While the North Shore had in fact been seriously under-populated for years and could well afford some new blood, especially younger white blood, the influx did create some logistic and supply problems.

  The BRR set up transit centers in places like Astoria and Seaside and Clatskanie, including one in a former bowling alley on Astoria’s newly re-named Lockhart Boulevard. One cold and damp night in early October, Major James Wingo was filling in as officer of the day at this transit center, helping to process lines of incoming white refugees and their families, who were being issued with temporary ID documents and assigned to a wide variety of housing according to need. Sometimes the Republic’s newest residents were given quite up-market housing that had been vacated by fleeing Unionists, sometimes crumbling tenements and trailers that had been vacated by Mexicans, sometimes dormitory-like facilities in whatever school auditorium or gymnasium or sequestered building could be adapted for such a purpose. At the moment it was luck of the draw.

  Wingo was standing off to one side talking to Captain Christina Ekstrom, who had voluntarily assumed the duty of housing and transportation officer for the asylum seekers, when he felt a tug on his sleeve. He turned and found himself facing an elderly woman in a ragged dress and coat, with a seamed face and thinning white hair. At the old woman’s side, holding her hand, was a little girl who appeared to be five or six, thi
n and blonde with watchful and suspicious blue eyes staring up at him. There was something disconcertingly familiar in the elfin little face, but Wingo couldn’t quite place it. “Can I help you with something, ma’am?” he asked.

  “I know you,” said the old woman. “I saw you once on TV.”

  “Yes ma’am, I’m sure you did. I do a few toothpaste and barbecue sauce ads on the side,” said Wingo.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, young man!” snapped the old woman. “I want to ask you something important. When I saw you on TV, you were shooting up Flanders Street in Portland with a machine gun. You was with that Cat-Eyes Lockhart guy and somebody else, a girl named Kristin McGee. I’m May McGee, Kristin’s mother. This is her daughter, Mary Ellen. Can you maybe tell me where Kristin is now?”

  “Oh, Jesus!” said Jimmy softly to himself, his heart sinking and his knees going weak. “Yes, ma’am, I know who you are. Kicky told me about you both. She loved you both very much. I . . . I don’t know how to say this, how to tell you this . . .” He waved his hands vaguely.

  “She’s dead?” asked May flatly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Wingo helplessly. “She was killed in action back in January.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was there when it happened. I am truly sorry. Your daughter was a brave soldier, and a good comrade and friend. We all miss her.”

  “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the old woman with a sigh. “I never quite knew what to make of her after she—after she went with you lot. I suppose I can guess why she did it. I just always wondered if, well, if she was sure about it.”

  “Yes, ma’am, she was sure,” Wingo told her.

  “I think I knew in my heart I’d never see her again, one way or the other. Well, we got to get on a bus. That young lady says she’s going to give us an apartment, maybe one we can keep if things work out.” May turned to get back into the line for the transport.

  “Wait a minute!” said Wingo. He pulled a notebook and a pen from his tunic pocket and quickly wrote down his name, and thrust the paper at her. “My name is Major James Wingo, First Battalion, Third Oregon Brigade, NDF. I want you to keep this, Mrs. McGee. Please. I don’t know what is going to happen over the next few months. I might not make it myself. But I want to try and keep track of you and Mary Ellen as best I can through the BRR, and I want you to remember my name. I’ll check back here later on and I’ll try to find you, but if that doesn’t work out for some reason, you try to find me. Now isn’t the time and place to get into all this, since we don’t know what’s going to happen, but one way or another, if I’m still around I want to help you and your granddaughter. Any way I can, for Kicky’s sake.”

  May looked at him steadily. “You know what she was? Before she came to you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know. I also know what she was afterward, and that’s all I care about. I owe her mother and her child everything I can give them. I mean that.”

  May stuck the paper in her pocket. “My guess is you don’t know as much as you think, but Ellie and me have been living mighty rough these past few years, and we have to take it where we find it, so I might just take you up on that generous offer, Major.”

  * * *

  The month of October dragged on, the days chill but clear, the leaves on the trees turning golden and layering the ground, the morning fog growing denser. Around noon on October 22nd, the daily staff meeting of the Third Brigade command gathered around a long table in their conference room in the old Clatsop County courthouse, a converted courtroom. The walls were now papered with maps and shelves and filing cabinets, and a large Tricolor flag hung on a staff over the chair where once tyrants in black robes had sat when they sent white men and women into living hell. It was five years to the day since the morning that the U.S. Marshals had surrounded Gustav Singer’s house in Coeur d’Alene to take away his children, because he and his wife told them “inappropriate” Norse myths and fairy tales at bedtime. But something on that morning had finally snapped, and America’s gun thugs soon lay shot to pieces in their smashed body armor by Singer’s neighbors. “Still no movement in the situation up at Longview?” asked Colonel Lennart Ekstrom.

  “Well, there’s activity of a sort,” said his daughter Christina wryly, tossing over a copy of today’s USA Today. The front page photograph, taken with a telephoto lens and rather fuzzy, showed two teenaged members of the NVA delegation to the peace conference out on a hotel balcony locked kissing in a passionate embrace. “I’d make some comment here about our tax dollars in action, if we were paying taxes.”

  “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be wearing major’s oak leaves now, Chris?” asked Zack Hatfield. “You’re out of uniform.”

  “Ask the Quartermaster,” she said, pointing to her father. “He doesn’t have any.”

  “What’s the latest intel on the Portland situation, sir?” asked Major Tony Campisi.

  “I had a talk with Mr. Chips by coded wireless chat before I came over,” reported Hatfield. “A code I hope the kikes can’t break, because things may be about to blow. NDF General Barrow has informed the Army Council that the conference at Longview is about to come to a head one way or the other, probably with a walkout by our people because the Americans keep on stalling. The whole thing seems to have turned into a delaying tactic, although no one quite understands what they’re delaying for. If an agreement is in fact reached, that Neanderthal jarhead Delmar Partman definitely intends to more or less mutiny against the Brat and the Sea Hag, and refuse to surrender the city to us.”

  “I never got the impression that buzz-cut ape had enough moxie or brains for that,” said Captain Jerry Lundgaard.

  “Somebody in D.C. is winding him up, we’re sure,” said Hatfield. “No good Marine would dare do such a thing as defy his commander-in-chief unless he had the most powerful political backing he could get. My money’s on that Jew rat Howard Weinbaum. He’s acting as point for the irreconcilables on their side at the conference. Turns out he was behind that little project a few months ago of trying to set up evangelical death squads to wage guerilla war against the Republic, but SS General Carter Wingfield nipped that shit in the bud.”

  “How bad will it get if he does, do you think?” asked Christina.

  Hatfield frowned. “Bad enough. Partman has almost two whole Marine divisions in the city, plus the FATPOs and assorted Unionist militia, police, and some Somalia-style gang-banger militia he’s using as terror squads to keep what’s left of the white population cowed. At least 35,000 men. The NDF’s numbers are growing day by day as thousands of young white men and women step forward, some of them coming from all over the world. A lot of them have prior military service, but most of them are raw recruits, our basic training out at Camp Rilea is necessarily rushed, and we’re still not up to par on our weapons and equipment. We’ve been trying to harass the enemy and cut off their supplies, but in a city the size of Portland there’s all kinds of reserves of just about everything they can beg, borrow, or steal. Partman is going to launch an offensive with all he’s got, most likely across the river against General Wingfield in Vancouver, but maybe down this way against us. Partman has the backing of a lot of powerful politicians in D.C., New York and Houston, the ones who never wanted this conference to take place at all. When he stages his mutiny they’re going to wave the red, white and blue all over the media praising this patriotic Marine who is Semper Fi to the good ole U.S. of A., yadda yadda, you get the idea. They’re going to threaten Chelsea with impeachment unless she backs off, renounces Longview, and resumes the war.”

  “Hell, her father and mother were both impeached, unsuccessfully, and it never seems to have bothered them,” said Campisi.

  “This time the impeachment move would be with the full backing of the whole pro-Zionist lobby, who backed the other Clintons back in the day,” explained Hatfield. “Hillary’s still running things, of course, but it could be that she’s decided she doesn’t like the odds and it’s t
ime to backtrack. The problem from our point of view is that we can just about assume that General Partman will launch an air attack on the two main bridges across the Columbia River, here in Astoria and the bridge at Longview. He’s kept the Portland bridges up because he will need them for his own attack into Vancouver, but he’s not a complete idiot. He knows he needs to stop the NDF from reinforcing each other either way across the river. He can’t leave those bridges up on his left flank. We figure that’s how he’ll make his mutiny announcement, by formally breaking the ceasefire and blasting down both bridges over the Columbia and maybe the bridges across Youngs Bay as well for good measure. And to be honest, guys, I don’t see any way we can stop him. We’ve got nothing but pea-shooters, comparatively speaking.”

  “What has he got by way of air power?” asked Ekstrom.

  “Latest report, two fully loaded B-52s and four F-16s at Portland Airport that Threesec feels are loyal to him and will obey his orders to devastate their fellow Americans, or former fellow Americans,” said Hatfield. “Plus a number of Apache and Blackhawk gunships he could also use against the bridges. Fortunately, PDX isn’t big enough to take many more military aircraft and still keep the civilian traffic flying, and he needs the runways for supply purposes. Those B-52s can level the bridges and the towns of Astoria and Longview as well from 30,000 feet, if he gives the order.”