The Hill of the Ravens

by H. A. Covington

  “When do we start?” asked Nel.

  “Right now. Let’s go.” said Redmond.

  “Go where?” asked the Afrikaner. “Which of the eight survivors of the Olympic Flying Column do we interview first?”

  “The ninth,” said Redmond.

  “Eh?” exclaimed Nel in surprise. “Er, sir, the ninth survivor was Trudy Greiner herself.”

  “Not really,” demurred Redmond. “We always say there were only eight survivors of that ambush, nine if we count Trude, but that’s not true. There were at least a hundred and fifty survivors over and above that.”

  “The Federals!” exclaimed Nel.

  “Exactly,” said Don. “Including the man who defected right afterwards to our side along with two of his men, and who afterwards proved himself to be a loyal Volunteer and a good citizen of the Republic. I’ll get us an aircar from the motor pool, and then we’re heading up to Bremerton. The very first person we interview this morning is the one who might be in the best position to give us

  information on the identity of the informer. The man who was on the other side. Former Federal Anti-Terrorist Officer Arthur McBride.”

  * * *

  Redmond dropped into the northbound traffic lane at 300 feet over Olympia, and they grounded on Seventh Street in Bremerton twenty minutes later. From there they drove to the address Don programmed into the pilotbot, the one in the files for Arthur McBride.

  McBride himself proved to be a tall and strong-looking old man, who still had something of the erect bearing one found in the more formally trained veterans from a time of general military sloppiness. Being products of their historical time and place, the deadliest of the NVA’s surviving gunmen from the War of Independence usually looked like white-haired old winos or doddering computer nerds from an age long gone. Some of them could still be seen lolling around in public places like seventy year-old teenagers with long out of date baseballs caps stuck onto their heads backwards, still playing ancient Nintendo games on handsets, the vets only detectable by their ribbons and the pistol butts visible over their waistbands. McBride’s own head was smooth and silky white, and he wore a neatly trimmed salt and pepper moustache. He welcomed the two BOSS agents into his home, a bungalow on a quiet side street, without comment or question. He was dressed in simple canvas trousers and a woolen pullover sweater. Apparently the current

  1930s look was not for him. “Let me get you both a beer,” he said, coming out of his kitchen with three brown bottles. “I make my own, like a lot of people in the Republic, and my red ale has won a couple of ribbons over there across the water in Seattle.” McBride produced three glasses from a sideboard, popped the bottle caps and poured out. “You’re retired from the Labor Service, I believe, sir?” asked

  Redmond. “Thank you,” he said as he accepted the brew.

  “Ta, mate,” said Hennie Nel as he accepted the glass, which he hefted in salute. “Skiet ‘n Engelsmann!”

  “Yes, Colonel, I’m retired from the Labor Service. After Longview I did twenty years in the NDF, left as a Command Sergeant Major. I never applied for officer training because of my background. It wasn’t that I was worried about rejection, it’s just that I would

  never have been comfortable with white soldiers calling me ‘sir’ after what I had been. Call it a penance if you like. After that I ended up in the Labor Service,” he told Redmond as he poured out a glass for himself. “A lot of retired NCOs do. Almost as fulfilling as the military in many respects. I got a lot of satisfaction over the years, whipping platoons of young men and women into functional workers willing and able to pull their weight in building a new country. I think I can honestly say that none of my boys or girls ever went to the bad in any way.”

  “That’s the impression I get. I only just remembered the fact, but my son Allan served in one of your intakes,” said Don. “He always spoke well of you.”

  “The kid who later became an astronaut?” exclaimed McBride with a fond smile. “Yeah, I remember Allan. He was a fine young man. You’re his father? You must be very proud of him. I understand from the newscoms that he’s on Mars now.”

  “Yes, we are very proud of him. We hope he’ll be home by next year some time.”

  “I hope so as well. Now, what can I do for you, Colonel?”

  asked McBride, sitting down in an armchair.

  “Sir, I know this may be something of a sensitive subject, but I am on a job right now that involves digging up a lot of old bones. I need to ask you some questions about the time before you joined the NVA.”

  “You mean the time when I was a member of the Federal Anti-Terrorist Police Organization,” replied McBride quietly. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had state security around to try and check up on something left over from the old days. Even had a few writers and journalists and a historian from the Party’s Museum of the Revolution in Ballard come by. You don’t need to dance around the subject, Colonel. I don’t shout the skeleton in my closet from the rooftops, true, but neither have I ever denied it to anyone with any legitimate reason to ask.”

  “I know that, Sergeant Major,” Redmond told him. “But something has come up, and you may be in a unique position to help us. My assignment has to do with the ambush that destroyed the Olympic Flying Column.”

  “I rather thought it might,” said McBride, pursing his lips. “I always wondered if and when the authorities in the Republic would ever get around to exhuming that particular business. I always felt that the full truth never came out. Go ahead and ask what you want, but before you proceed, I may be able to tell you something that no one has known before.”

  “And that is?” asked Redmond.

  “Mmm…tell you what, let’s save that for last, shall we? I am curious to know what’s brought about a revival of the Ravenhill thing this late in the day. If you’ll go ahead and ask me your questions and I can put it in context, my information may mean more.”

  Redmond ran it down in his mind and made a quick decision to play it the old man’s way. “Very well. We have received a communication purporting to be from Trudy Greiner,” he told McBride. “If it’s authentic, she says that she is coming back to the Republic on October 22nd. She claims that she is innocent and she is demanding a public trial on the allegations against her. You can see why your recollections of that time may prove of some importance.”

  McBride whistled softly. “Yes, I can. Boy, wouldn’t that put the cat among the pigeons? I know that the Olympic Flying Column was set up by an informer, all right, because I was there when my monkoid commanding officer got the call, but I have no idea on earth who it was. I told all I knew back then, to Corby Morgan himself, and it was all God’s own gospel truth. I figured it had better be, seeing as how if he thought I was lying about the smallest thing Morgan would have had me shot. I’ll be glad to go over it again with you, though.”

  “Very well, sir,” said Redmond. “First I’d like to get some personal background. In my initial briefing President Morgan told me about the night you and those other two men came into the camp to defect.”

  “Yes, Lance Corporal Schumacher and Sergeant Petoskey. They’re both dead now, I’m afraid. Shoe went with Davy Leach in

  Force 101, and he was killed during the Cleanup by a Laotian drug

  gang who objected to being put out of business. Pete was killed in an aircar crash in Spokane eight years ago. I have never regretted that decision, Colonel. It was the most terrible and devastating one I ever made, but it had to be. It came from what the mystics call the dark night of the soul. In that moment I left behind everything that I had

  ever been, but in the same moment I found what I had always been looking for. This country has given me something more precious than any so-called freedom to make money hand over fist and to swill consumer goods like a hog at a trough until I burst. There are some things in life more important than the freedom to go to hell in whatever way one chooses. Things like honor, duty, pride and integrity. The Northwest Republic h
as given me the ability to get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror, and that was something I never had under the old order. Something no white man had back in those days.”

  “Curiosity question,” said Redmond. “Do your neighbors and former co-workers know about your former affiliation?”

  “Yes, I think they do,” replied McBride. “I am damned if I can explain how, since I never discussed it, but I guess the word simply got out into the community by osmosis or something. They all seem to know, and yet I have to say that in all the years I have lived here, not one individual in this entire community has ever caused any trouble or thrown my past in my face.”

  “You’re not the only Fed who came in from the cold, you know,” said Redmond. “There were thousands of defectors, people like you who could no longer stomach what the government was doing to the white people of the Northwest.”

  “Yes, I know. But I was unusual, being a FATPO. We were supposed to be the élite, you know, the mighty fighters against racism and fascism who swept all before us in the name of diversity, and so trés chic. Élite, my ass! Mother of God! I never encountered such a collection of criminal, half-insane misfits, perverts and thugs of all races in my life! It’s as if the United States government deliberately went out of their way to recruit the very worst white trash, black trash, brown trash and yellow trash they could find. The women were worse than the men. I could never bring myself to touch one of those leprous psycho sluts, which probably was how I started to get a dubious reputation among the org. Any white male who refused to partake in drugs and sexual degeneracy was suspect. We had to be eminems, or to use a less polite designation, we had to be whiggers. You know that term, Colonel?”

  “White niggers,” said Redmond. “Yes, sir. I know it. It is legally considered to be a killing word today in the Republic. You

  don’t call a man a whigger unless you’re willing to back it up, all the way. The only time in my life when I ever took one of my sons out back of our house and beat him bloody with my belt, was when I heard him call another boy a whigger, however carelessly and unknowingly he did so. He had to learn. Then I explained to him what it meant. To his great credit, my son voluntarily went to the other boy’s home and apologized, and without my telling him to do so.”

  “You got it. Blacker than the blacks, if we wanted to fit in. Monkey Meat Woodrow Coleman was the worst animal of all. I think he would have practiced cannibalism if he could have gotten away with it, and maybe towards the end there he could have done. On the night I heard the WPB had finally tracked him down in Detroit, I popped the cork on a bottle of champagne. I really, really hope that some of the information I gave helped those hunters, as old as it was.” “It didn’t exactly happen like that,” said Redmond, remembering his chat with Randall the night before. “But don’t

  worry, Coleman had enough time to savor the moment.” “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “So why did you join FATPO in the first place, meneer?”

  asked Nel.

  “Well, if you’ve read your history books you know the American economy tanked under Bush Two and things never really recovered. From then on it was permanent depression. When I came out of high school in Peoria it was almost unlivable. I couldn’t make the affirmative action quotas for college, so I went into the Marines at age seventeen. By the time I was twenty I had I fought counterinsurgency in the occupied lands of the Oil Raj, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi and Egypt, but things reached the point where ZOG couldn’t even pay its mercenaries and I was laid off. I came out of the Corps at a time when civilian jobs for white males were almost non-existent,” McBride told them. “My mom was very sick with lymphatic cancer and I had to have some kind of medical insurance that would cover her. FATPO was one of the few jobs going back in those days that still offered any benefits at all, never mind medical coverage for family. For what the hell good it did me. Mother died shortly afterwards. I hadn’t been with FATPO for three months before I was ashamed to be seen in that uniform. God in heaven, to this day I wonder how some of the people here can forget, never mind forgive!

  Let me tell you something that happened to me,” McBride went on. “A year or so ago, I was in the park here in Bremerton, along with two of my grandchildren. I saw a man about my own age, who was also there with his own two grandchildren. Our kids were playing together on the swings and the monkey bars and obviously having a great time of it all, so we nodded to one another. On his lapel he wore the green, white and blue ribbon from the War of Independence, but so do many men of our age. I noticed he had a crushed and broken nose, obviously from way back. This guy bothered me for some reason. He looked familiar, but for a long time I couldn’t place him, and I got the impression he felt the same way about me. I saw him looking at me kind of funny. Then through one of those weird coincidences in life, we recognized one another, almost simultaneously. I remembered where I’d seen him before, and I could tell by the expression on his face that he remembered where he’d met me. It was almost forty years ago, in an interrogation room at the Bremerton FATPO barracks. I was the one who had given him his broken nose, this horrible defacing scar he’d had to live with for the rest of his life. I did it when I smashed him in the face with a rifle butt during one of Major Woodrow Coleman’s famous interrogations. There I was, confronted with my sin in the living flesh. What the hell could I do?”

  “What did you do?” asked Hennie Nel.

  “I did the only thing that was morally possible,” said McBride in a dead voice. “I walked up to that man, whose name I still don’t know, and I simply said, ‘I was wrong. We were all wrong. I did wrong, to you and to others. All I can say to you is that as God is my witness, I am truly sorry for the pain I have brought into your life.’”

  “And what did he say?” asked Nel, fascinated.

  “You know what the man replied? He shook his head and said,

  ‘I’m not sorry. When you bastards arrested me I was innocent in every sense of the word. Being spirited away to a secret location and tortured by the United States was something that happened to foreigners, to dark-skinned Muslims, not good old white boys with their baseball caps on backwards like me. To this day I don’t know who ratted me out, who accused me of being involved, whether it was done for malice or money or whether it was a simple mistake. But whoever called you and told you I was a Jerry Reb had it wrong. I

  wasn’t. Until that morning you came for me, I never had a political or a racial thought in my head. I had nothing to do with the rebellion, I thought I hated racism, I thought I loved diversity, the gorgeous mosaic and all that happy horse shit. I thought I was a good American. You showed me that I didn’t want to be an American any more. I wanted to be a man instead, a white man. When that nigger major finally decided that his underlings had blundered, he dismissed me with contempt as just some little pissant white boy not worth bothering with. Then you let me go. You threw me out the door, broken and bleeding. I crawled away, and after the wounds in my body were healed I knew I had to heal the wounds in my spirit. So I joined the Northwest Volunteer Army and I fought for the rest of the war on the side of my people and our new nation. You destroyed my innocence, you destroyed the extended childhood we used to have back in those days. But in exchange, you gave me more important things. You made me grow up. You gave me something I never had, dignity and pride, pride in myself and pride in my race. For that, sir, I will be forever grateful to you.’”

  “Then what happened?” asked Sergeant Nel, fascinated.

  “We had nothing more to say to one another, so I walked away,” said McBride.

  “Getting back to the Ravenhill incident, you may recall that at one stage, the Federals claimed that they had located the Column through satellite surveillance. What makes you so certain they didn’t? What makes you certain that the Olympic Flying Column was betrayed by an informer?” asked Don. “You said you were there?”

  “I was there when a phone call came,” said McBride. “Our Rapid Reaction company was put
on standby at about six that evening. Nothing specific, we just hung out in the hangars by the chopper pads in our full kit, all our weapons and with live ammo issued, ready to roll at a moment’s notice. We twiddled our thumbs, smoked our dope, and waited. There was no briefing beforehand like there was normally when we were going after a specific target, a search and destroy or a sweep to arrest all white males between ages fifteen and fifty in a given town for deportation to Nevada…hell, you know the kind of things we used to do, I’m sure. When we were out for a specific purpose that had come down through the normal channels, there was a set procedure and that wasn’t followed. I was

  scheduled to take over as Officer of the Day at midnight that night, so at twelve I went to the Charge of Quarters room to relieve Captain Hernandez. I found Major Coleman there, and he was sober, which was unusual for him at that time of night. He kept pacing around, looking at his watch, going outside for a smoke and then coming back in, nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. It was pretty obvious that Coleman was waiting for something.”