The Hill of the Ravens

by H. A. Covington

  The Boys of the Old Brigade

  The Boys of the Old Brigade

  “Oh father, why are you so sad on this October morn? When Aryan men stand proud and glad in the land that we call Home?”

  “Son, I’m just remembering that far-off fateful day, When I was just a kid like you, and joined the NVA!

  Where are those men who stood with me when history was made?

  In memory I always see the Boys of the Old Brigade!”

  VI.

  “So now what? We go on a historical fishing expedition?” said Hennie Nel as their aircar landed on outskirts of the great sprawling naval complex on the west side of the Puget Sound that was the Kriegsmarine’s Bremerton Naval Station.

  “Yes, although I’m not exactly sure what fish we ought to be baiting our hook for,” replied Redmond thoughtfully. “God, this has the makings of an unholy mess! Let’s discover the truth first if we can, Sarge, then once we have it we can sit back and figure out just what the hell to do with it. Our next step is to interview the eight known survivors of the Olympic Flying Column. This is going to be a sensitive process, Nel. Our goal has to be to find out why each one of them survived. In other words, why the hell were all eight of these people somewhere else so didn’t ride into the ambush at Ravenhill Ranch with the rest of the Column?”

  “My first question would be why the two men in the green bakkie that was being used as the Column’s scout car survived,” ruminated Nel. “I don’t entirely buy McBride’s explanation that they were let go on Federal SOP. If Fattie was out for the reward, why not

  the reward for two more of us terrorists? And how did they know that

  Murdock himself or Melanie Young weren’t in the scout vehicle?” Redmond winced. “As it happens, Sarge, I know a little bit

  about that aspect,” he said quietly. “Bill Vitale was one of the men in the scout vehicle. He is an old friend of our family, and he talked about that with me. He and Volunteer Lars Frierson heard the shooting that came from behind them, and they realized that they had been let slide and the main force had been ambushed. They turned their vehicle around, went back a ways, de-bussed and approached on foot. They ran into a FATPO outpost and killed two of them, they realized from the sound that there were hundreds of Federals between them and the Column and that they could never make it through alive and rejoin Murdock. They then followed General Order Number Eight and performed E & E to their respective hideouts.”

  “General Order Number Eight?” asked Nel.

  Redmond smiled. “Otherwise known as the Swamp Fox Order, as in he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. Unofficially known as Feets Don’t Fail Me Now! Even more unofficially known as the Don’t Be A Dead Hero, You Dumb-Ass! directive. The Old Man knew that the life of every Volunteer was worth more than a hundred dead Feds, and the purpose of that General Order was to make sure that our most precious resource was not sacrificed needlessly. Some American and Jewish propagandists called us cowards then and still do because of that order.”

  “That’s crap, sir,” said Nel with a scowl. “The objective of the soldier is to win wars, not conveniently hurl themselves to destruction on an enemy’s sword. And cowards don’t revolt in arms against a tyrant to begin with.”

  “I know. I like old George Patton’s version,” responded Redmond with a chuckle. “No one ever won a war by dying for his country. You win it by making the other bastard die for his country. Oh, I don’t deny we had a few who really showed yellow and used that order as an excuse for genuine cowardice. We always spotted that, and they didn’t last. But I know a lot of vets who followed that order in the spirit it was meant to be followed, and who never forgave themselves for it. Bill Vitale is one of them.”

  “What technique should we use in interviewing these survivors, sir?” asked Nel, tactfully changing the subject.

  “Nothing fancy,” replied Redmond. “A little deceptive candor might go a long way for us here. It will be hard for us to make up any plausible explanation as to why we are exhuming old bones, especially old bones as hallowed as those of the Olympic Flying Column. I think the best approach would be to simply tell these people the truth, that we’ve received a communication we believe to be from Trudy Greiner and that she is Coming Home. Be interesting to see how they react to the news. And also, we need to see if we can find out just how each of them got into the NVA in the first place, how they became racial nationalists or National Socialists or whatever their particular world view is. Back in the old days, when you joined the Party you had to sit down and compose a minimum 10,000 word essay on just that subject, giving as much detail as possible. The reasoning behind that requirement was that no one could tell a lie that long and complicated without saying something that would trip him up.”

  “Which one of the eight survivors of the Column do we speak with first, Colonel?” asked Nel, looking over the files on Redmond’s desk. “You mentioned Admiral David Leach, I know, but why him?”

  “I think we should start with the one who poses the most potential danger to the safety of the Republic if it turns out he’s a long dormant traitor,” said Redmond.

  “Wouldn’t that be Doctor Cord?” queried Nel. “He is after all the de facto head of the Republic’s space program.”

  “Mmmm, maybe. Although if Cord is a long term ZOG spy intent on sabotaging our space program, he doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it. We are the only nation on earth who even has a real space program, thanks to him. No one else is even on the moon permanently, never mind Mars. My vote for that sinister distinction of most potentially dangerous if disloyal would be Leach of the Kriegsmarine. Also known as Bloody Dave from his guerrilla days with the NVA.”

  “That name rings a bell, and not just for being an admiral,”

  said Nel thoughtfully.

  “It should,” said Redmond grimly. “David Leach is the hero of the Spokane incident in Wellington, New Zealand. He faced down an entire country with one battle cruiser and got our sailor boys back out of the local hoosegow. That might have been a little before your time,

  when you were still in South Africa. Leach damned near started a war, with the United Nations jumping up and down and going booga booga booga all over the place, but Leach got his men back, and he demonstrated for all the world to see that you don’t fuck with the Northwest Republic. That was my last year in the Special Service before I transferred to BOSS. Thanks to Leach’s nautical brinkmanship I spent a wonderful two weeks in the snow out on the Montana border, looking down the barrels of our .88s at eight thousand Chinese regulars and a good thirty thousand more-or-less American troops across the line, wondering when they’d get the order to attack.”

  “How many were you, sir?”

  “One division, about 4500 men, so we had them outnumbered,” replied Redmond. “Turned out that once again Doc Cord’s plasma beam weapons saved the day. The Americans couldn’t bomb our positions without losing eighty percent of their aircraft and their pilots in the first wave, and when push came to shove they didn’t dare meet us face to face. Since Vietnam, they’ve never dared to meet anyone face to face, man to man, on the ground. Without their air cover we would have butchered them, and they knew it. You might say the Spokane affair was the Northwest Republic’s true entrance onto the international stage. The reason I consider Admiral Leach the most politically sensitive of the survivors is that Bill Vitale is a field commander, but Leach sits on the General Staff and he’s privy to the Republic’s most top secret defense intelligence. He is also in charge of creating a new series of warships for the Kriegsmarine, one that will give our country a global reach, some kind of super battleship or carrier. If we can get these things afloat it may eventually mean one day we can start recovering countries like South Africa and Rhodesia and Australia for our people. If one of the Olympic Flying Column survivors is bent, then David Leach is in the position to do the most damage.”

  “How did the Admiral acquire the name of Bloody Dave?”

>   asked Nel.

  “After Ravenhill Leach went a bit nuts, or maybe he was nuts all along and Ravenhill just sparked it off. Leach disobeyed orders and unilaterally selected his own next assignment. He went east on his own to join that maniac O. C. Oglevy’s crew in Idaho,” recounted

  Redmond. “Nothing succeeds like success, and so the Party overlooked his insubordination. Later on Leach was a commandant himself, during the last year of the war, leader of the Ellensburg Flying Column. I think they gave it to him as part of a quiet effort to break up Oglevy’s gang prior to independence and make sure we didn’t have any Ernst Röhm kind of incidents. The commandants of each mobile partisan unit operated with complete tactical freedom and independence of action. Leach was one of our best, and I have to say probably our cruelest after Oglevy himself. To be fair, we were fighting the cruelest of foes, an enemy who was trying to destroy our entire race. Leach returned the favor, with interest. He literally ran the Americans out of his sector by brute force. Toward the end, FATPO and even the U. S. Marines refused direct orders to go into the Ellensburg district, they were so afraid of Bloody Davey Leach. He also ran out or slaughtered every single individual of any race who couldn’t show blood in the face.”

  “Blood in the face? So Leach is Christian Identity?” asked

  Nel.

  “No, he’s a National Socialist,” replied Redmond with pride

  and satisfaction. “It’s hard to believe now, when our whole structure of society is based on the Third Reich and when army officers and SS applicants have to pass courses in National Socialist ideology, but there was a long and disgraceful period after Commander Rockwell’s murder when the American National Socialist movement descended into pure slapstick comedy. The Old Man was NS himself, as I am sure you know, and he tried to do what he could to restore some sense of honor, dignity, and purpose to National Socialism in this country, but he once described it as trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with a troop of monkeys let loose in the building. To give him his due, Leach and those NS comrades like him went far towards restoring our ferocious, don’t-fuck-with-the-Führer’s-boys reputation. The world learned to fear us again, as it should. Leach never took prisoners and he dealt with the local loyalists in what was then called a proactive manner. Proactive as hell. Chain saws and propane torches, mostly. All those red white and blue Masonic dishrags disappeared from the front porches, and that neck of the woods around Ellensburg got real disloyal, real quick, I can assure you.” Don paused, almost as if

  hesitant to add something. “Leach was also in charge of Force 101 during the Cleanup.”

  “Force 101?” asked Nel.

  “They were responsible for enforcing the Offences Against The Race Act,” said Redmond. “Specifically Article Nine. Odd I should be speaking with Leach today. My daughter was asking me about that just last night.”

  “The hangmen,” said Nel bluntly.

  “Yes. They were the troops who executed over seventy thousand people in the course of a single year, mostly white people who were proven to a moral certainty to have been sexually involved with blacks or other non-whites.”

  “Moral certainty?” asked Nel. “Not legal certainty?”

  “What law? There was no time, there were no courts, and hell was loose on earth,” sighed Matt. “That’s why even today we still have people petitioning the Party for investigations, trying to clear grandma or some other relative who danced Danny Deever from a lamp post when Force 101 came through town. Yeah, there were some mistakes made, and the Party has paid some pretty hefty compensation settlements and a lot of scholarships to descendants. But mostly, we got it right. Whether they were with us or not, the whole community in the Northwest secretly loathed race-mixing. All white people do, deep down. Few were denounced without cause. There was a time when you couldn’t go outside in any middling sized town in the Northwest without seeing a corpse or two dangling from the nearest tree or lamp-post. Some white men swinging alongside their Asian or Filipino whores, but mostly it was white women and their…beasts of pleasure. Sorry, the very thought of that particular crime makes me want to vomit. That law is still in force, you know, as well it should be from now until such time as the Imperium truly arrives. It all comes out eventually. Some of those wretched women stayed on after Longview, God knows why. Did they think people would just forget? Someone always remembers and eventually someone always tells. Just last week a fifty-nine year-old grandmother was hanged in Pullman. Her own son found some old photos in the family attic his mom had been stupid enough to keep, photos of her canoodling with her Chinese boyfriend from high

  school. The man was NS and he denounced his mother. He did absolutely right, and I thank God that I am not he.”

  Nel nodded. “That was long before my time, but I understand why such things had to be. There has to be a racial line that no one crosses, not ever. Because when you cross it then everyone loses everything. Maybe if we had been a little more strict on the old Immorality Act under apartheid, I’d still be in Germiston now. Poofters swung as well?”

  “No,” said Redmond. They pulled up to the gate of the naval base, identified themselves to the sentry, and were directed to an office building about a quarter mile down on the left. “Homosexuality was considered to be so shameful, as indeed it is, that society should not even acknowledge it in death,” continued Redmond. “It wasn’t done in public. The few faggots and dykes that were too stupid to flee when they saw what was coming…they simply became no more, and where possible every documentary and tangible trace of their very existence was erased. You know, sergeant, that even today there are no actual laws on the books in the Republic against that perversion? It is classified as a form of mental illness, which it is.”

  “It is blasphemy,” replied Nel with a frown. “Such creatures should be stoned as the Bible says. It is the man or the woman saying

  ‘I know better than God who made me how my body should be used. I can overrule God if I want to.’”

  “Yes, from the Biblical viewpoint it is certainly blasphemous, but faggots really are crazy as hell,” said Redmond, shaking his head. “You’ve had full medicals before, in the army and when you joined the force, right? You’ve had a prostate examination?”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Nel with a scowl.

  “Yeah, I know. Having things jammed up your ass hurts, but a homosexual actually enjoys that kind of filthy pain and degradation. That’s mental illness in my book. On the very rare occasions when we come across it in the Republic, the people involved are quickly certified as insane and confined in a mental institution, where they are either cured through intensive therapy or if that does not prove possible, then their minds are laser-erased and they start over. Believe me, when that happens, in one sense they’re just as dead as if they had been stoned.”

  “But stoning would be so much more fun!” protested Nel.

  “I think you and Bloody Dave will get along fine,” chuckled

  Redmond. He parked the car. “We’re here. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The two security cops met with Bloody Davey Leach in the technical wing at the bustling Bremerton Naval Yard. From the window of his office Don looked out and saw a row of long, lean atomic-powered U-boats in the slips, while another of the gray shapes was cutting through the blue waters of the Sound, heading out on patrol. Admiral Leach was a brawny scowling man in his sixties, with a grizzled sailor’s beard of reddish-white. One could easily imagine Leach standing behind the wheel of a clipper ship braving a nor’easter or rounding the Horn, and maybe ordering the odd keelhauling. The chest of his blue Kriegsmarine uniform gleamed with a dozen decorations.

  He was in his office poring over the plans for the Floating Fortress N. R. S. Bismarck. “The plasma weapons are the big thing,” he explained, rolling up the blueprints. “Since the First World War, no navy on earth has ever really been able to find a counter to the submersible, or a viable defense against air attack other than surrounding the vesse
l with a screen of other aircraft. Surface ships have been reduced either to carriers, missile launching platforms, or transports. We’re working on an integrated, computerized particle-beam interception system that will knock out any torpedo or missile fired from below and bring down anything in the air, up to and including satellites and space stations. In a few years, gentlemen, the Kriegsmarine will sail the oceans of the world as the only seaborne military force since 1914 with a reasonable expectation of immunity from underwater attack or aerial assault. The other world powers will eventually develop similar systems. Who knows? Combined with a plasma particle-beam air defense weapons system, we could be seeing the rebirth of the battleship as an effective weapon of war. That also means that we can effectively move division-sized troop contingents overseas without having to rely on costly and vulnerable air transport. The old twentieth century idea was that air power alone would do it all. The Americans had a string of squalid little victories against greatly undermatched opponents toward the end of the century

  through mass bombing, and that seemed to confirm the theory. Well, since the invention of the particle beam, air power is broken and sea power is coming back into its own.” Leach gestured towards a sofa against one wall; the two BOSS men sat down while he leaned against one of the draftsmen’s tables. “Now, what did you want to talk to me about? Found a spy here?” The old man grinned. “You won’t have to work him over. Just threaten to leave him in a room alone with me for five minutes, and he’ll tell you anything you want to know. I ain’t done a man in nice and slow in a long time.”